Most in-person team building activities focus on building trust and deepening relationships – both of which requires getting to know people. Luckily, the getting to know someone, getting a sense of who they are as a person can be done virtually quite easily.
Take a few minutes at the start of a team meeting to go around the room and have each person check in with something beyond work or about them as a person. One effective technique is the “rose & thorn” – share one beautiful thing that’s happened since the last meeting and one ‘ouch’.
A leader can set the expectation that everyone on the team checks in for a 1X1 with their teammates once a month or so offline. I call these ‘virtual coffee dates’ and they don’t need to be more than 15 minutes.
Other leaders use a format where each person shares something they need help with, and each teammate provides an idea or resource.
Virtual teambuilding can be done!
