Focus On: Team Building Games You Can Run Remotely!

The idea of running team building games remotely, using services like Teams or Zoom is something that seems anathema to many trainers. How can you possibly do team building remotely? How can activities delivered remotely be fun? How do you get engagement? How do you ensure everyone is involved and participating? 

So, you might be surprised to learn that within Trainers’ Library®, we’ve got plenty of brilliant team building games that can be facilitated over Zoom or Teams with ease. 

Activities with serious learning that your participants will love!

Here are a three of my personal favourites:

One of the easiest team building games to run virtually, you can reduce the time needed for this activity by asking participants to read the story and highlight key points before they attend the workshop. 

A whodunnit with a twist, participants and trainers alike love this one. (As with the others in this list, the face-to-face version has consistently earned five-star reviews!)

It takes about 90 minutes to run (or 60 minutes if participants come prepared) and we suggest allowing a further 30 minutes for the review/debrief. It tests communication and listening skills, teamwork (including the need for everyone be involved), leadership, information gathering, problem solving and much more. 

For the face-to-face version, follow this link.

The remote delivery version of Hold the Front Page! is even easier to facilitate than the face-to-face version, which is just one reason why I love it!

In this fun activity, editors and their teams work against the clock to get their paper’s front page published on time! 

Incoming news stories arrive through a series of links, whilst voicemails left by an increasingly excited roving reporter with a breaking news story means the situation remains dynamic, even as the deadline approaches.

Great fun for participants and facilitators alike, Hold the Front Page! takes 50 minutes to run. We suggest (perhaps after a break) spending about 30 minutes debriefing the activity and reviewing the learning. And there’ll be lots of it as this activity tests teamwork under pressure, time management, project management, accuracy, attention to detail and much, much more!

For the face-to-face version, follow this link.

Jack Fruggle’s Treasure is one of our members’ enduring favourites for face-to-delivery. And this version is no less fun. We’ve used our e-learning expertise to create a web-based activity that successfully replicates the physical cards used in Jack Fruggle’s. 

Each participant will receive a link to the activity and it’s up to them whether they work collectively with their teammates (which might prove slow) or use the people within their team more effectively by distributing tasks. Of course, they’ll need to work out what they’re doing with the answers they find to have any hope of finding the treasure, so teamwork and communication skills will be key! 

Slightly shorter than our face-to-face version, Jill Fruggle’s Virtual Treasure Hunt takes about 40 minutes to run and 20 minutes to debrief. It tests problem solving, teamwork, communication skills, leadership and more.

For the face-to-face version, Jack Fruggle’s Treasure, follow this link.