Team Bonding: Uplifting Your Office While Working from Home

Team bonding used to be so easy when everyone was working under the same roof, but now it is more difficult than ever. The latest virtual team bonding was the weekly happy hours majority of the offices would partake in from the comfort of their couches or those most anticipated Zoom chats with family and friends. Yet, now more than ever, companies need to establish new workforce virtual bonding experiences other than weekly staff meetings. A recent study from the team at Slack by Robert Samuel Hanson suggests, “a whopping 35% of employees have suffered from a lack of accountability since the Work-From-Home orders were put in place. Even more staggering, 73% of colleagues feel less connected to their teams and projects since working entirely remote.” It’s true that in the past couple of months virtual team activities have suffered tremendously due to people being burned out from daily video meetings, events that need structure to succeed, technology malfunctioning and not being tested before the meet, or even low employee engagement.

So how do we adapt and execute effective virtual team bonding experiences that are beneficial and fun for higher employee engagement? Read the room, ask what your is excited about, what they miss doing at the office for their monthly bonding times and see if you can re-create it virtually. Your events can also go offline (keep practicing social distance guidelines and precautions), build some structure into every virtual meeting, build some hype around the event, and customize, as necessary. It is so easy to accomplish and everyone will have fun and engage. We at SMS have been having weekly staff meetings to give updates and check in with the team, our continued education tutorials continue to keep everyone engaged and expanding their knowledge (see previous blog to learn more), and with football kicking off this week we just had our annual SMS Fantasy Football Draft (virtual of course). There are hundreds of other activities any office can take apart of such as trivia lunch hours (jeopardy, scattegories, heads up, etc.), meme chats (have a conversation in only memes, SMS partakes in this activity at the end of the week to show how we’re all holding up), or merely talking about working from home (blow off some steam by talking about it and checking in on each other). I’m sure every other office is doing different forms of these virtual team bonding experiences, just keep going and keep that morale up, and it will pay off on different aspects for your work force from accountability, morale, project completions, and overall employee engagement.