15 Virtual Activities to Reinvent Employee Engagement During the Pandemic

One thing the pandemic has taught the organizations is that nothing is permanent. Businesses need to evolve their work culture constantly to stay in the mainstream. Especially when you are working from home, you will see that employees’ engagement in HRM starts receding. That’s exactly what most companies have been witnessing since lockdown, a dipping employee engagement in HR.

Importance of Virtual Games for Team Building & Remote Team Games

Staying away from the usual office setup for a prolonged period can take a toll on your employees and thereby will affect your business adversely. Since the situation is not changing, the organizations need to reinvent employee engagement strategies through virtual team activities to ensure smooth operations once again.

Employee Engagement in HR with Virtual Team Building Games

To ensure that an employee connects with other teammates, it is important for HRs to step-in and work towards increasing employee engagement for team building. Introducing these activities in your daily routine will help the employers on two fronts:

• It will bridge various understanding gaps between the teammates and will enhance cooperation between the distributed teams.
• Secondly, it will ensure better HR and employee engagement for an outstanding remote working experience.

Try Virtual Team Building: 15 Unique Online Team Building Games for New Employees

We have made a list of some of the best remote team building activities that can help organizations do better with employee engagement in HR.

Virtual Games for Team Building: –

• Online office games
• ‘Speak Your Heart Out’ Session
• Scavenger hunting
• Organize movie nights
• Celebrate birthdays & personal milestones
• Virtual coffee breaks
• Organize online quiz sessions
• Host an anxiety party
• Bring your pet to work desk
• Truth & Dare
• ‘Share the Picture’ That Defines You
• Create Your Bucket List
• Sing a Song Night
• Enliven Your Workstation
• My First Day at Work

• Online Office Games

To start off, playing virtual games online is an excellent way for team building. Though it is much easier to organize these games when your employees are in one place but since COVID is an unprecedented happening, HR staff can try playing these virtual team games remotely in equally divided teams or chat groups.

For this exercise, you can connect with your staff through video conferencing and play interactive games that involve team building. You can also divide the team in two and make them compete with each other. This will prove to be a good virtual team icebreaker.

• ‘Speak Your Heart Out’ Session

What you gain out of these virtual games for team building is that you can also learn and gain knowledge about things you aren’t familiar with. However, the only prerequisite it needs is, active participation of the employees to ask questions and the willingness of your employee to share their knowledge.

You can ask people to join for a conference video call and ask them individually to some share interesting facts about things that interest them, or share their experiences from a recent trip. In a team, it helps you to understand the other person more and form connections with them.

• Scavenger Hunting

Scavenger hunting or fact digging is also a great exercise for managers to adapt and connect with the employees and to teach them about the lesser-known facts about their work. In scavenger hunting also you can ask the team to turn on their camera to ensure nobody is cheating. Then you give them topics that range from language to food, region, place, etc., to choose from.

You can ask the teams to dig up some lesser known facts about it. To make it interesting, you can ask the team representatives to prepare a short presentation on your findings and share it with your colleagues. You can play it like a remote team games.

• Organize Movie Nights

You can organize movie nights where all participants can start a movie at a time, discuss characters, and the story. This will ensure a better HR and employee engagement where everyone can speak in an informal setup. It can be one of those amazing virtual team icebreakers, so that your employees get back to work with enthusiasm.

• Celebrate Birthdays & Personal Milestones

Celebrate staff’s birthdays virtually by sending cakes to them. And celebrate with the whole staff wearing birthday caps in their homes coming live to wish you a happy birthday as you cut the cake as their families stand behind them. Little things like these create a lasting impression in the minds of employees and their families.

At a time, when we are already going through the COVID crisis, it’s all the more important that your teammates stay motivated and don’t feel like a cog that the organization can replace any day.

• Virtual Coffee Breaks

Activities like drinking tea or coffee together can help your teams bridge the communication gap. Even though going out for coffee breaks isn’t possible for you right now, you can do it online with your colleagues. What’s great about coffee breaks are, they allow the employees to de-stress and bounce back with great productivity.

• Organize Online Quiz Session

A quiz session can further spice up the experience of virtual employee engagement. It will push your employees to give their best and win whatever is there to win. You can organize a TV-like contest where participants come online and play together. However, for organizing a quiz, you need to give sometime to your employees to prepare.

In this activity, the employees get certain topics/subjects on which they will be questioned. This can treat this activity like a virtual team building game.

• Host an Anxiety Party

You heard it right! Host an anxiety party to get de-stressed. For this, you may want to bring your best boozes out of your home bars and pour yourself a drink, and discuss it with your colleagues as you relax. If an employee is facing challenges with regard to a project, he/she might be hesitant to approach the manager straightway.

However, when drinking together, though virtually, the chances of confiding into the mentor are higher. This activity is especially useful for online team building with new employees.

• Bring your Pets to Work Desk

This activity gives employees the opportunity to show off their pets through video conferencing. As HRs, you can ask the employees to come for a 15 minutes session online along with their pets and share their stories.

• Truth & Dare

Truth & dare is a popular game among groups. This can also work wonders for HR and employee engagement initiatives. You can ask every employee to share five statements about themselves, and others have to guess which on those statements are true. Also, one group of employees can ask another group to perform an activity as a dare.

• ‘Share the Picture’ That Defines You

Employee engagement in HR can be made more interesting by asking every employee to post a picture of their life online. One picture that defines who they are. The picture that gets the maximum likes will win a prize. Isn’t it something every employee would love to do!

• Create Your Bucket List

This can be an interesting virtual team game where every employee can create their own set of life goals and aspirations. Further, they can have a discussion with their reporting managers online during the mentoring session.

• Sing a Song Night

Fridays at work from home can be fun again with this virtual team building game. Employees can come during in a conference setup and play the ‘sing a song’ game. This type of activity can go for hours and employees can also include their family members in this activity.

• Enliven Your Workstation

Employees have become used to of the work from home setup. Everybody has their own work zone where they spend 9-10 hours of a day. Wouldn’t it be interesting to organize an activity where employees can take a picture of their workstation and share with other employees! While some of the workstations will depict the minimalistic taste, others will be more jazzed up. A workstation for every personality!

• My First day at Work

This is another interesting virtual game for team building where everyone can share their experience of the first day at work. Who was their first buddy at work, interaction with the team, etc. – such experiences can be shared within a closed group to further enhance the team bonding.

Virtual Team Building Games: Try For Your Remote Workforce

You can try different virtual team games ideas to organize Fun Fridays, Motivational Mondays and so on. Work can be fun even for work from home employees when everyone comes together to share and celebrate in a virtual setup.