Working remotely can easily let anyone feel disconnected. There are fewer opportunities to socialise or get to know new team members. It is a total opposite for teams that are working in the same location, where they can easily ask questions, chat, and have lunch together to strengthen their connection.
What do you do when your team is distributed across different locations?
One of the most requested video in the past was Best Games for Remote Teams when teams were suddenly forced to work from home, so we’re adding a few more fun games to that list!
Here are some of the things we’ll cover in this session:
- The reality for most remote teams
- Why virtual team building is a game-changer when running a remote team
- Our top picks of the latest online games and activities we’ve had
We’re presenting a rundown of more online games you should consider for your next virtual team building.
What’s your favourite virtual team building activity? Did we missed a game that you like? Checkout our first upload for Best Games For Remote Work Teams.
If you find this video helpful, comment below!
Download the slides here: https://www.itgenius.com/top-5-games
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
Hey, what’s up, guys. Pete Moriarty here. Great to have you here. This is going to be pretty fun, I’m going to be sharing some of our favorite top games for remote teams. And this is all about connecting you and your team while you’re working remotely. Obviously, COVID has hit and we’re all in a new reality of working. And for us, as a team, as a business, we’ll be working completely remote, a whole company, over 40 people now not quite from get go, but let’s say for the last five or six years.
So what I’ve been really interested to share with you is some of the top games that we play with our team online, and we’ve got like a whole library of these, our HR team, which we call the empower team works on these every single week. So we’re going to be sharing some of our best ones with you. And we’ve got some good fun games up our sleeves. So without further ado, let’s start talking about what we’re going to be talking about today. And we’re talking about our top games for remote teams.
We put a video up and we published it on our YouTube back in April when COVID was happening. And we were helping businesses sharing some of the ways that we work remotely as we have been doing for over six years now. And the video went absolutely nuts, just went bananas. So we decided, “Okay, well, let’s put together some of our best games. These are the top games from our team.” We’re not only going to share what the games are. I’m also actually going to share what the actual slides are and are all of the resources for the games as well. So you can actually literally take these games and you can use them for your team too.
Our business is all about helping small and medium-sized business owners to grow their business, get working more productively, help their teams work more productively as well. And as I said, we’re a remote company. We’re now got more than 40 people in our business. And everyone works either from home, from our co-working spaces, but we’re really big believers in flexible working. And we help businesses enable or become enabled and empowered, now, for them to work remotely with the teams as well.
And so the primary product that we work with is called Google workspace, which is a collaboration platform and an online business platform, which lets you get your work and get your business done. But we also work with other cloud-based tools and technology tools. We are a technology consultancy and that it means that we’re all about helping small business owners get the right tech in place so you can grow and scale your business and be successful.
So we have a new reality right now, and that is that everyone’s working from home. Everyone’s completely fatigued on their Zoom calls. Fortunately, most people’s idea of working remotely is just working exactly the same way that you’ve always worked and firing up Zoom sessions. So we want to show you guys a different way of working and for us, a different way of working is doing fun things like we had a remote team dress-up party.
I think this was for Halloween or it might’ve been for someone’s birthday, but we’ve got a whole team to dress up and basically pretend that they were a movie character. So I can see a Harry Potter there. I can see the chick from [inaudible] ACA, I was Romeo from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, but you can see there’s some pretty inventive costumes there from the team, which is pretty awesome.
And these are the kinds of things that we do not just, for team building obviously, but also really to try and foster and build a feeling of connection while our team are remote. Now, we’ve got a pretty big challenge in that even in pre-COVID days, our team were working remotely from all different locations and we had to have a feeling of connectedness and a feeling of closeness with the team and trying to do that across different States and across different countries even can be quite a challenge.
What we do is at least once a year, we fly everyone into one city and we have a big party and we get drunk together and spend time together. But what do you do for the times in between that? And so, some of the strategies that we do is we have city meetups, we call them, where we will have a dinner put on, company pays for it, and anyone who’s in that city or around that city and people will travel hours to hang out with their colleagues. We’ll all have a dinner together. And we try and do those about once a month. They were a little bit disrupted by some of the COVID restrictions around travel, but thankfully, we’ve had them starting out again in the Philippines, which is pretty awesome for our team there.
As well as those, we do a fortnightly hangout call with our team, which we call TGIT. Now that stands for thank God it’s Thursday. And that’s basically a social hangout. Now think of that as your equivalent of like a Friday night drinks with the team where everyone just jumps on a hangout and we either play games, sometimes we’ll play online games, sometimes we’ll watch a movie together, sometimes we’ll just goof around. That’s basically our social hangout for the remote team.
So, if you don’t already have a regular social hangout scheduled or you don’t have some kind of like physical meetup scheduled, they might be a great place for you to start with connecting your team while you’re working remotely. There’s no science to this. It’s all just about collaborate and have your team working in a way where they feel a little bit more like they’re a team that’s together rather than a team that is apart. So I’d like to know if you’re watching on the live stream right now, or even if you are in the repeat, let me know, what are some of the things you do right now to connect your team? While they’ve been apart this year, what are some of the strategies that you’ve used to have everyone feeling together because wherever you are in the world right now, you’re probably doing some kind of remote work right now. It might even be some kind of remote connection with your family.
I know that for me, I’ve spent a lot of time on video calls with my family. I did virtual games nights with my friends as well, where we all jumped on a video call and we played games together online. And what I loved about these is that feeling of connection even though we’re in different places. Now, three years ago, I moved from Sydney up to the gold coast and I found a lot of my friends circles ended up changing, but I still wanted to be connected to my family and my friends who are mostly down in Sydney.
And I found that collaborating and working online, using the tools that we already have available to us, our businesses suite of tools, I was able to still have a pretty fun time with my friends. Some of those things we covered in our previous video, which is available on our YouTube channel on the best games for online teams. We use things like Jamboard to play Pictionary. And that’s one of Google’s great tools that lets you draw online and you can use that on a tablet or on a phone, draw pretty pictures and collaborate and share that with multiple people.
One thing that we’ve done with our team is when we host TGIT or when we host a party with our team, we will actually fund snacks. So we’ll give everyone 20 or 30 bucks or whatever it is so they can grab some beer or grab some pizza or get some Uber Eats delivered to a home. And that means that everyone feels like the company has shared with them, just like the business would do if we were taking a team out to dinner.
So let’s jump in with some of our top games here. I want to share with you guys some of the best ones. I asked my empower team to give us five of their best. We have sometimes five or six games per fortnight, every time we do this. So we picked out some of the best ones for you guys. And at the bottom of this video, we will have a link for you to download and get access to all of the slide decks with all of the resources for these games. So you don’t even have to make these up yourself. You can grab these resources and actually go and play them with your teams. That was one of the most requested things from our last video. So all those resources are going to be available in a link below this video.
Let’s jump on to game number one. And this one is called zoomed in. So what we’re doing here is we’re splitting up into teams. Usually, we like to have teams because it gives everyone a sense of comradery. And it’s also a good way for people to get to know their neighbors, get to know other people that might not usually work with on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes with teams, we will have the teams actually do a team war cry. If we’ve got a company conference and for a couple of weeks leading up to the conference, we’ll actually have the teams work on their war cry or work on a team song or something silly like that. A little bit of fun, which gives the team an opportunity to collaborate with each other, get connected with those that they might not be working with on a day-to-day basis.
Once you’ve got your teams in place, then we’re going to be issuing points to those that guess or complete objectives correctly. This game is called zoomed in and it’s all about identifying objects in a photo. And so you can see here, we’ve got a super, super zoomed-in image and that will be up on a slide and the team will have to submit guesses as to what they think that is. And we’ll just use a Google Meet to connect everyone for that. And then you can see this one happens to be paintbrushes. This one looks pretty interesting, happens to be a rockmelon or I think it’s called something else in different parts of the world. In Aussie, we call it a rockmelon.
So that’s the first game there. We’ve got a slide deck with a bunch of different images here. We can’t show them all, obviously, because we don’t want to give them away, but we’ve got heaps of options there for you guys to play with your team. Game number two, this one is called guess the movie: emoji edition. And I really love this one. Our team had a heap of fun putting this one together, and this one’s all about your team’s creative thinking skills.
And so again, you’ll have a slide show and you ideally want to have the team split up into teams and then you can assign points to the teams, but basically, you’ll have a string of emojis and it won’t have any words there. And the team will have to guess what that movie might be based on the emoji. So you can see the first one there is Silence of the Lambs. And then we have the second one there Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I remember that I guessed that one correctly when we did that. So it’s basically just one string of emojis. Obviously, you won’t have the answers there and then your team will have to guess what that might be. And so, I absolutely love this one, gets people’s creative brains firing, gets them thinking outside of the box.
So our third game is called around the world. And this is about guessing the country. This one, pretty simple and straightforward. We’ve just got a number of images and then your team will need to guess the country really good because these are all about being a quick draw. And I will share with you a tool that you can use to actually have a buzz so your team can actually do a buzzer rather than just firing comments off in the comments. It makes it a little bit more fun and a little bit more competitive. But again, we just have a slideshow. It’s got a bunch of pictures on there and then inside the slideshow, each time you bring up each one of these, it’s a matter of who buzzes first or who puts in the country first. And then that person becomes a winner and they get to collect their points.
Next one. This one’s called guess the logo, a little bit like guess the country, but this one is for corporate logos. So you can see here, we’ve got a number of different logos that don’t come with any words or some of them come with partial letters and it’s the team’s job to choose which brand or which company they believe they are. I know two of these out of six or three, I could say, I know out six because one of them is fairly obvious, I think, but that one is a pretty awesome, pretty cool game there.
Remember when you’re putting together these games and these presentations, it’s really about fun. So you want to make sure that you’ve got some side challenges on the side, as well as the main goal of earning points. If you know the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, if everything is always about points and less about fun or less about discovery or less about learning, then the team will at the outset first be motivated, but then they can become de-motivated over time. And that’s because intrinsically, we’re wired to be motivated by what’s inside us, we’re motivated by a sense of mastery, we’re motivated by a sense of purpose.
And so, you want to be careful not to go too hardcore on the points, have some fun points. If one of your team members swears, they lose 10 points. Or if someone is late to a call or late to a meeting, then maybe they lose five points. So throw in some kind of fun ones like that. You could even have something like, if someone picks up their glass or their drink or their drink bottle with their right hand, then they lose five points. So, force everyone to pick up their glass with their left hand.
They’re the things that you can do to make it fun and make it just that little bit more enjoyable for the team. Game number five, this is called The Deserted Island Scenario, and this is less of a game and more of like a team building activity. But let me tell you, this is one of the best ones that we have done with our team. And so, here in this scenario, you want your team to imagine that they are on a deserted island. Imagine they’re on deserted island and they have to decide what things they would want to bring with them on the deserted island.
You might give them a limit. You might say, you can only bring five things or you can only bring 10 things. But what we do is we actually fire up Google Jamboard. And so, it’s just jamboard.google.com. And you can access that online and create a jam, which is like a digital whiteboard that you can share and collaborate with multiple people. And we’ve had like 30, 40 people on one Jamboard. It doesn’t crash. It’s totally awesome. Just like a Google doc, you can have as pretty much as many people on there as you want. But what our team actually build out is a Jamboard on what they would take to the deserted island.
So here’s an example that our team brought together. You can see their booze, glow sticks, rope. What on earth would they do glow stick for? I guess for being able to see at night, that might work. I would probably take a solid torch or something. Anyway, map and a compass. Don’t know how they’ll phone home. I think I’d probably go for a satellite phone. And then we’ve got another team here, they brought a boat. That’s probably a good idea. Chris Hemsworth, not sure why, or maybe it was just a surfboard, but you can see here that the team had got pretty creative.
The idea here is not what they bring, it’s not about earning points. The idea here is the story the team tell about what they actually brought along and why it was important to them and most of the team get a pretty good laugh about that when everyone shares them. So that’s game number five, that one is called the desert island scenario. And as I said, we use Jamboard for that. So that’s how we build out that one, which is pretty cool. You just create one jam, share it with everyone, and then everyone can start building that one out.
There’s one little tool that I wanted to actually share with you guys. And it’s called buzzin.live and buzzin.live, I’m just going to open it up now and show you guys what it looks like. Buzzin.live is an online system that you can use for your buzzers. So you can literally create a little buzzer online, and then I’m going to open up the buzzer here and everyone will get a big green buzzer. I think I’m the admin, so I don’t see it on my side here. But everyone will get a big green buzzer and they can click the buzzer when it’s their turn to guess. And this creates a bit of a race, like a game show for everyone to hit the button so they can then be the first to be able to guess.
What happens is it’s like a sudden death scenario where if the first person guesses it wrong, then we will pass an opportunity to steal over to another team. And what that does is it gives everyone the fairness not to be able to brute force answers in the games like guess the country or guess what the zoomed-in thing is. So you can use buzzin.live. That’s a free tool. And you can use that for creating your online games and getting everyone connected there, little freebie for you.
So if you want to get access to all of these games, they are inside our private Facebook community. Now, this is available exclusively for business owners who are utilizing Google workspace. So if that’s you and you’re interested in getting access to these, we will have the slides. I will have all the resources for you to get going. We’ll even have the resources like our buzzin and the links to everything that you need to get going on these games inside our group. So if you want to get access to that, you can head to this URL now, itGenius.com/group, and that will redirect you into the group.
You need to answer a couple of questions before you’re let into the group, just to double-check that you’re the right person for the group because inside there, there are other business owners and we’re talking about Google workspace, we’re talking about business tools. And in there, we also share other resources, live videos, things that you don’t get to see in the public, videos before they go live to the public will be shared inside that group. So there’s plenty of exclusive content in there for you to check out. And, of course, if you’re utilizing Google workspace right now, it’s a great place to hang out with other business owners who are also utilizing the system as well and get additional value.
So I want to say thank you. And I want to go and encourage you to go set up your team, meet now with your team, and get them on the Friday or the Thursday night drinks. I would love to know from you guys what were the number one games for you? What one are you most interested in rolling out with your team? Drop a comment down below. And if you use any of these games with your team, I’d love for you to let us know, send us a message, drop us a line on any of our social pages, send us a message and I say thanks. Our team would be really happy to hear from you guys.
If you’re a business owner and you’re interested in getting support, or you’re interested in a free consultation from our team, you can head along to itGenius.com or you can send us a chat message, just head along to the chat URL there and you can send us a message on our social pages. Our team are able to help you with technology strategy. And if you’re a small business or a growing business, or maybe you’re a large established business, and you’re looking for help, making sure that your strategy is on track. If you want to make sure that you get the most out of your investment in Google workspace, or if you just want someone to do a bit of an audit of what you’re doing right now, check if you’ve got the right CRM, check if your doing the right thing in the cloud world, there’s so many tools and things available for small business owners.
As you’re on the journey of growth throughout your business, you’ll find that from time to time, it’s good to get a helping hand for someone who’s been there, done that, grown and scaled a business, and created value for our team and for our customers as well, using really great technology tools. So if that’s you, if you’d like some help, drop us a line and we’ll be very happy to help you guys out. See you next time.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
