Fun Company Culture Activities to Engage Your Remote Team

With many businesses now working remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic, keeping morale high and teams engaged has never been so important. 

When teams are dispersed, and the head office is no longer the foundation of the company culture, it’s essential you work to continue to create the same engaging culture remotely just as you would in a physical workspace. 

But knowing what activities to do to support your team culture can be a minefield, especially if you’re completely new to remote working as a company. 

To guide you into implementing an engaging culture during this new reality of remote working, I’ve listed some of the best activities being created by businesses around the world.

Virtual business phone system Ringblaze has adopted movie nights to bring their team together. 

CEO and Co-founder of Ringblaze, Dennis Vu says, “One of our favorite activities to build culture as a remote team is having movie nights together. We choose a movie and stream it live while we watch and leave comments in the chatbox. The most difficult part is actually choosing the movie, the rest is super easy. It’s a great way to find out what your employees are into and it gives us something to talk about in our all-hands company meetings. Since our team is fairly small, this is a great activity to do after work hours – since we’re all in isolation.” 

Visual editing platform Canva has an 800-strong team who are all working remotely to stop the spread of COVID-19. 

While Canva has a vast array of culture activities that their team can get involved with, from live fitness classes to food challenges, by far the biggest stand out culture activity for their team right now, is live gig nights from local artists. 

As many musical artists are unable to get work during the coronavirus, Canva is hosting live gigs for their teams, supporting both their local music artists and providing live entertainment for their team to watch every Friday night.

Software comparison site Capterra has a ‘happiness team’ who help to create new ideas for the team each week to keep them engaged and connected. 

Corina Perjan, Marketing Specialist at Capterra, explained how their teams get to pick a new activity to try with their colleagues. 

“We have our dedicated “happiness team” who collects and comes up with creative ideas to engage the team. Our virtual coffee, and happy hour team meetings are the most popular. We usually divide ourselves in to groups of 5-6 people so everyone can participate in the chat.

“We also have our “virtual kitchen” – it’s a video chat link that is open 24/7 for a quick chat with a random colleague that in normal circumstances you might have met in the office kitchen.”

Energy Consultancy Indigo Swan has taken their usual office antics and simply brought them to a new remote work level to help keep their team happy while working from home.  

Jaime Llyod-Jones, Head of Marketing at Indigo Swan, explained what they’ve introduced for their team. 

“Every Friday we have our drink cart Friday, just as we would in the nest, but this is now virtual of course. We’ve also been challenging each other every day in our team What’s app group. Today’s was to post a throwback photo but we’ve also had challenges to share what we are eating for lunch, a photo from our daily exercise and drawing our very best version of a swan.”

“Today we also launched ‘Lockdown Bingo’ for both members of the team and externally. Just something to bring a little bit of fun to everyone’s day and something else for us all to catch up about.” 

Insurance company GuardHog Technologies has taken their remote working activities above and beyond the call of company culture.

To support their entire team, and others who are now working from home, SUPERHOG has created a Stay at Home Hub, which includes a variety of activities and classes that people can get involved with.

Kamila Miller, Marketing Manager at Guardhog Technologies explained how the Stay at Home Hub is helping their team.

“We’re all going to face tricky obstacles in the coming weeks, that’s why we took the decision to create our Stay Home Hub – a place where our staff could participate in live streamed activities, such as virtual yoga classes, meditation, music lessons and even learning sign language to communicate with your baby!”

“On the Stay Home Hub, we’re only addressing positive vibes. As a team, we are in contact with each other everyday, and this is really helping to keep team spirits high and ensuring that we are all able to still have a laugh during this tough period. Because we all love our Stay Home Hub so much, we want to spread the love. If you have an activity or hobby that you would love to share with others, then please get in contact with us.”

Creating your own fun and engaging culture activities is a positive way to stay connected with your team during this pandemic, and help people continue to nurture those all important workplace relationships. 

Here’s a few tips on how to get started with making your own remote work activities; 

• Ask for suggestions from the team – get people involved 
• Think about the popular activities you already do in your culture, and take it online 
• Use activities that will help people get better connected and learn more about each other 
• Don’t make it mandatory – people are already stressed and pressured without feeling the extra social pressure of having to attend an event – keep it relaxed and fun. 
• Make sure there’s a bit of variety in the activities so that people can choose to take part in activities that best suit them

For more help or support to improve your company culture during this crisis, contact me about my culture consultancy programme.