For most employees, the idea of working from home used to be a luxury.
Is this still standing? Or are people starting to miss the social side of going to work?
Whilst we may have enjoyed the novelty of conducting Zoom meetings in our pyjamas and hanging out with our pets all day to start off with, remote work also has its drawbacks…
According to studies, 41% of new remote workers say the biggest change they have experienced is how they collaborate and communicate with their colleagues, as well as the lack of social interaction. This is causing employees to feel more isolated and lonely. In addition to feeling unsupported and disconnected from those they work with, ultimately, this can reduce employee wellbeing and even increase staff turnover rates.
Creating connections between your teams and colleagues is vital to ensure the success of your company and to create an enjoyable working environment. Virtual team building allows you to do this and gives colleagues a chance to build relationships remotely wherever they are in the world.
Here are some virtual team building activities that you can implement within your workplace:
- Set friendly challenges: Set up challenges for your teams to give them a group goal to work towards. A great option for this is a fitness challenge such as “Do as many squats as you can in 1 minute” or “ Walk 200 miles between the group per week”. Not only does this bring some fun rivalry, but it also boosts wellbeing.
- Send ‘daily snapshots’: Every day, encourage colleagues to post a picture of something. Whether it’s what they had for lunch, a photo of their pet, what they saw on a walk or just something that made them laugh. This is a great conversation starter and will help improve communication and build strength within the team.
- Live remote coworking: When working from home, employees may be missing the interaction they have with their coworkers. You can imitate that feeling with live remote coworking. Set up a virtual office with a conference call or virtual meeting. Employees log on in the morning and work like normal over video. This allows casual conversation to flow while working and employees can feel motivated by seeing each other hard at work, boosting productivity.
- Connect team members that do not usually work together: Sometimes it can be easy to fall into the routine of talking to the people that you regularly work with and rarely branching out to chat with others outside of your close colleagues. Even more so if you don’t see these people in person, and they are just names on a screen. Put employees’ names into a hat and pull out pairs to have a virtual coffee or meetup.
If your business is looking for a base but not a workspace, our virtual offices are for you. They come with the added benefit of access to our meeting rooms as well as serviced co-working for an extra cost – the perfect solution for connecting with employees usually based at home.