Gamified and Personalized Internal Communication. Managers can agree that employee engagement and retention are at the top of their priority list. Which means they are good 1. What is Virtual Team Building? Current candidates will be future employees and the experience we deliver to them is the beginning of their employee experience within a company. A mental wellness training can be delivered on topics such as self-care, stress management and motivational talks. To bring people together and provide employees with easily accessible learning opportunities while remote, the L&D team at Procore created “Procore TV,” which consists of a varied schedule of live streams for employees. Exclusive Resorts hosts fun themed Zoom video meetings for its team members. 2. , asks one trivia question at the end of each conference call. … Icebreaker Games for Remote Teams. Rally Content Contributor, and employer brand & recruitment marketing consultant with The Employer Brand Shop. Many companies are experiencing unanticipated downtime during this quarantine. When employees are involved in the change, they’re more likely to be engaged and committed to creating a culture that thrives. Having a team huddle at the start of each week is another great way to increase accountability and productivity. Skill share workshops provide employees the opportunity to speak on topics that relate to the business or share their talents that aren’t business-related. These types of events help employees to get to know one another in a more casual setting, which can help form more attachment to your organization and lead to better working relationships. To resolve this, Elly and the leadership team at TextNow are leading Zoom classes on activities that they enjoy outside of work. There are a variety of ways to leverage technology and keep employees connected. "Employees need to feel included, as if … A strong virtual culture fosters collaboration, productivity and innovation. This initiative works particularly well for helping new hires feel more connected within the organization! Creating a positive virtual employee experience must be deliberate — it takes a lot of cross-functional collaboration and work to get it right. Employee Engagement 21 Best Virtual Team Building Activities & Games 2020 With your teams scattered across the globe due to remote working, virtual team building activities and games are a great way to break the ice and engage them informally to foster their bond. The following is a short list of the best virtual team building activities for remote teams and employees. When in the office, employees often have multiple occasions to interact with people from different teams. Ultimately, setting aside time, budget, and resources for employee engagement activities will increase motivation, improve employee retention, and ultimately make your workplace more efficient and productive. Employee Engagement Ideas for Remote Workers [+Tips on Following Through] Before we discuss the specific employee engagement ideas for remote workers, we recommend that you implement certain project management, HR, video conferencing, and team collaboration tools, to make telework interactions easier between and within teams. These activities result in happier and more productive employees, more effective teams, and a stronger company. Every three weeks, the integration automatically pairs up two employees who have signed up to participate in the program. The benefits of cross-departmental training are vast. Remote teams all over the world use QuizBreaker to boost engagement and morale, including at companies like the New York Times and Google. where its marketing team has taken on TikTok challenges and creating funny, light-hearted videos to boost happiness among the employees. teambuilding.com, tiny campfire and Tea vs Coffee are run by the same folks as Museum Hack. Create and use your company’s virtual coin to reward, recognize and boost employee engagement. Donut reviews have mentioned employees thoroughly enjoying the tool as they’ve met with individuals with whom they normally wouldn’t have crossed paths. All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. I use my global expertise to provide virtual and in-person consulting and leadership coaching to the students at Babson College, Ivy League students and my global network. In addition to their regular monthly town halls, the company has started hosting virtual “ask me anythings” (AMAs) with their CEO and other leaders using Slido. Peter Arvai, CEO of. We asked 4 practitioners to share their best ideas to engage remote employees and keep your corporate culture alive. This is why at Procore the Workplace Experience and Employee Life team has been tasked with managing the virtual employee recognition experience so people continue to feel appreciated for the hard work they’re putting in, even when they’re not in the office. A virtual scavenger hunt, likewise, can be one of the best remote employee engagement activities if you are looking to build a remote team. These regular AMAs provide the opportunity for GoDaddy’s 7,000+ employees to feel informed and connected to one another. Investing in employee development doesn’t necessarily require a financial output. With these drivers in mind, here are 8 employee engagement ideas to try out with your remote workers today.. 8 employee engagement ideas for your team 1. It also keeps them engaged and learning about the company even if there’s no room for advancement. For example, employees are able to expand their skillset and therefore pick up additional responsibilities. Online Office … For 1:1s, we’re Zooming from our phones and giving each other virtual tours of our neighborhoods. Objective: These remote team building games can act as an icebreaker when you play this for the first time or a new hire joins the company. Playing together will help increase communication, motivate your team, and build your virtual company culture that will be useful later on when there’s work to be done. Remote Employee Engagement Activities That Every Disruptive Brand Should Try. For round one, challenge your team members to find the most unique thing they have in common. Boriana Slabakova, cofounder of PetPedia, said the pet encyclopedia company forms teams by departments and uses the general Slack channel to ask questions one by one. This is important because without an in-person hiring process, candidates don’t have as many opportunities to learn about your organizational culture — so our digital touchpoints become even more important. This has proven to build a connection and find a common ground between colleagues. Music is what connected the employees of Finastra as the company brought together 20 musicians from over 10 countries to form a virtual music band. 1. If you’re thinking of doing the same, you could give your employees examples of the types of events and activities they might organize and provide them with the right tools to connect (like a virtual meeting software tool). So in addition to continuing to recruit for critical roles, Elly’s team has been finding ways to improve their virtual candidate experience too since their hiring process is now remote. And for ensuring this, virtual team building activities are the way to go. Each person teams up with a colleague and the team that answers correctly wins Amazon gift cards. People can tune in to microlearning and personal development sessions, meet and greets with senior level staff and even fitness classes. Employees want collaboration, communication, problem solving, creative thinking, authentic connections, gratitude and appreciation, a strong company culture, and accountability. Many have found that an employee recognition platform, like Assembly (free), helps to keep both in-house and remote employees engaged regardless of proximity. Virtual games. Here are some examples of some of the stories that Alex has sourced from the INFAgram channel for the @lifeatinfa Instagram account: Waiting out the pandemic can be tough, but it does come with a few perks. 1. Encourage employees, managers … They also spend time talking about how to communicate different virtual experiences internally and externally, so employees know what’s going on and so that candidates can get an idea of their virtual interim culture. Using the company’s awards system, Alex rewards employees who share pictures and stories from their day with “Applause points” that they can redeem towards different prizes over time. ... We play all kinds of games and activities at lunch, ... walks on calls where I don’t need to share my screen. To still provide this type of interaction, Elly’s team has relied on the Donut Coffee integration for Slack. There are also 3 AMA sessions a month for specific teams and focus areas, where the Tech/Corporate, Customer Care and Sales team can ask questions that are relevant to them. Managers should keep an open mind and be receptive to employee feedback. You won’t need much here – just a good platform and the ability to come up with some great ideas. Our support staff will get back to you in … 3. They can encourage employees to share pictures of their pets, children, favorite memes, cooking skills or workstations. Creative strategies, engaging workplaces. Elly always shares her love of yoga with people, so she’s bringing everyone together to reduce stress. Some examples of the 10 items are a high school yearbook photo, the ice cream in their freezer, a ticket stub from a show they’ve attended or a board game they enjoy playing. Ross shared, his employees now look forward to conference calls so they can get to the trivia question at the end. #LifeAtINFA #newnormal, A post shared by Life at Informatica (@lifeatinfa) on Mar 23, 2020 at 11:03am PDT, Elly Bradley, Director of Talent, TextNow. Ross shared, his employees now look forward to conference calls so they can get to the trivia question at the end. Maintain high employee engagement for … So we asked 4 practitioners to share their strategies and ideas for employee engagement activities to help you navigate this new territory and keep your virtual workforce engaged. Praise shouldn’t only come from managers but from peers, too. Peter Arvai, CEO of Prezi, recommends to keep the meetings at a maximum of 24 minutes because the mind wanders after 18 minutes. This session also led to a few follow-up sessions on topics from Allyship to Intersectionality and beyond that other ERGs have participated in and helped to support too. #LifeAtINFA, A post shared by Life at Informatica (@lifeatinfa) on Mar 25, 2020 at 10:41am PDT, No office, no problem! These AMAs were started to provide updates about things that are changing in response to COVID-19 — like business changes, return to work updates and more. Shannon and her employer brand team member sit on different ERGs within the organization and participate in many of the employee experience initiatives that ERG members organize. Eating lunch in the cafeteria, coffee breaks and even walking to and from the parking lot provide the chance for employees to meet people outside of their immediate teams. Donut is a tool integrated in Slack used to strengthen relationships between employees. The bot pairs team members who don’t frequently interact with one another and nudges them to connect. When it comes to ice breakers for virtual teams, though, you need to get more creative. Each employee is given a minute or two to share what they’re working on, what they need help with and what they hope to accomplish. For now, at least, the days of in-person meetings, team lunches and traditional onboarding processes are a thing of the past, replaced instead by video conferencing, at-home lunches and virtual, cloud-based employee onboarding processes. They’ve also created a work from home (WFH) channel that has become very popular. Then ask the remote employee to share the story behind the picture they shared. 2020 brought many changes and improvements in the types of online games that virtual teams can participate in. Taking short breaks from work to meet up with colleagues has been proven to be effective for boosting employee engagement and productivity. From there, Alex chooses some of these stories for external amplification too. When you don’t see your team every day, it can be harder to remember to take the time to recognize people for the great work they’re doing. The purpose of the game is to help improve employee engagement by connecting people with similarities. These events are planned, promoted and conducted using Microsoft Teams and Yammer. In addition, the TextNow team has also focused on providing candidates with useful information about their updated recruitment process. In a traditional office, employee engagement activities are easy. Employee Rewards & Recognition. U.S. Unemployment Claims Rise To 965,000—Could Vaccines And Joe Biden’s Multitrillion-Dollar Plan Turn Things Around? This approach takes virtual events to the next level! I've gained a breadth of knowledge working internationally in Europe, America and Asia. Strong internal communications are always important, but they’re even more important when teams are distributed. KNB Communications holds a scavenger hunt where they ask their team to find 10 items and share pictures of each. Not everything needs to be organized from the top down! To create these water cooler moments while virtual, the team at Informatica has created different Yammer channels for employees to have more casual non-work related conversations. The session talked about how to process, grieve and take action following the death of George Floyd. From there, the employees can choose to have a video coffee conversation to get to know one another and learn more about what the other person does. This channel has grown in popularity week over week throughout this time period. Virtual team building hits on a variety of different ways to boost employee engagement. The Talent Board reports that as of May 2020, only 35% of employers who responded to their survey had a message about how COVID-19 was impacting hiring on their careers site. Virtual team building games and interactions help remote workers feel included and connected to their team and the overall company culture. Here are some quick links to the different types of virtual team building activities we cover in this guide: Chapters. Since it has slowed hiring for many organizations, a lot of us in talent acquisition and Recruitment Marketing have had to shift more of our time from external recruitment to internal employee engagement activities. If you you’d like to check out more virtual team building activities, Outback Team Building & Training offers four virtually-hosted options for your remote team. One of their primary projects here is to revamp the TextNow careers website to focus more on their culture and values and less on their perks. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. One of the simplest and most popular solutions has been virtual happy hours. Companies can inspire healthy habits by holding and encouraging mobility breaks, meditation sessions, virtual yoga and mental wellness trainings. These are the employees who make it easy to do your job well. Michael Alexis, CEO of Team Building, sends his employees a s’mores kit so they can meet at a Tiny Campfire. This is the best time to focus on upskilling workers. Employee Engagement for All. I'm a black belt in Six Sigma, former Society of Human Resources (SHRM) President and domestic violence mentor. 2. GoDaddy has created a special taskforce to rise to the challenge of preserving and enhancing GoDaddy’s culture while working remotely. 4) Host virtual team bonding activities Social events and team bonding activities are really important for many employees. 4 ) Host virtual team building games and support virtual employee experience matters recruitment... 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