Virtual Trust Building Activities for Remote Teams

Virtual trust building activities can help remote teams to nourish and develop positive team morale and increase their productivity. This is true for workplace teams as much as students who are involved in virtual or remote home-based learning environments.

You don’t need a science degree to understand that people get along and are more productive when group members trust and support one another. The stronger the connections and relationships you develop, the more your effective your team’s communication will be which in turn creates a lot less friction and conflict.

Trust Building Helps Teams Flourish

Team members are more likely to offer and contribute ideas to critical planning and decision-making sessions when there is an absence of fear or judgement. Ideas and development flourish in these workplace environments, but they do not happen on their own.

Research is really clear on this – the most successful workplaces and classrooms in the world are those with intentionally nourish and develop a trusting and healthy environment – and it does not matter if your group can interact face to face, or remotely via a virtual medium like Zoom.

Which brings us to our list of favourite virtual trust-building activities.

Favourite Trust Games for Remote Teams

When you present one or more of the following virtual trust-building activities, you can expect immediate fun and engagement to help you set the mood for the start of your meeting, your day or the whole project.

These activities have been proven to be successful because they invite participants to communicate and share and build respect for others, not to mention, they are great fun. Enjoy.

Are You More Like

You can play this as a large group or in partners, depending on the variation of this exercise (there are several)and your purpose. In a large group, you can simply present a series of Are You More Like attributes, such as dog or cat, and then invite volunteers to share their responses. There are dozens of paired matches you can choose from the activity detail page (click the link.) Alternatively, you could divide your group into partners and equip each with a series of attributes to discuss in their breakout room.

Emoji Cards

They say a picture tells a thousand words which is what makes these cards a really valuable resource for inviting interaction, sharing and building trust. Display a bunch of these cards on the screen for your group to browse, and then invite one or more team members to pick a card in response to a question you pose. There are so many questions you could ask, but start simple such as “Pick a card that captures a fun moment you enjoyed this past week.” As your group becomes more comfortable, ramp up the challenge by asking a question like “Which card do you think reflects the health of this group right now?”

You Choose

This exercise seems so simple, but it is truly a powerful trust-building activity for groups. Be sure to teach your group how to use the annotate tool on your video conferencing platform, and then share your screen with the 2, 3, or more options you wish for them to discuss. Then sit back and guide your group towards making a decision. Be sure to read the Leadership Tips in the activity detail.

ID Numbers

This is one of my all-time favourites and has been presented to rave reviews during much of this current COVID19 pandemic while people have been located remotely. Ask your team to grab a pen and paper and by way of demonstration, show them how to mark up their unique identity numbers. If you’d like to see this exercise in action, be sure to watch this YouTube video which is an extract from a longer webinar which showcased stacks of virtual interactive exercises.

Making Connections

We all love to tell stories no matter our age. This fun no-props style activity is ideal for virtual or online settings because all you really need is access to audio but, naturally, when you can watch people, the story just gets richer. One person starts and then taking turns, each of your team members shares that they too have that thing in common, and off you go. You could even play this by typing into your chat room if you had no video or audio!

By Mark Collard - Experiential Trainer, Author & Speaker

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