As this post’s title may have tipped off, we’re going to take stock of team-building activities for conference calls. It seems like remote and hybrid work will be sticking around for the time being, which cements a continued need for video and audio conference calls among teams. But when your team is widely dispersed or simply temporarily unable to occupy the same office space, it’s both more important and more challenging to connect and build trust on a personal level. In this post you’ll find some of our favorite options for remote team building, so head below for more details!
- Why Virtual Team Building Activities Are Important
- Top 10 Team Building Activities & Ideas for Conference Calls in 2022
- Kaltura Conference Calls for Enterprise
- Final Thoughts
Why Virtual Team Building Activities Are Important
As we mentioned above, a great and effective team depends on trust, connections, and shared goals. And regular team-building activities give you a caring, connected team. When managing a remote team, some type of virtual team-building activities (whether over conference calls or otherwise) are particularly important. They will facilitate communication and collaboration across your team and put emotional connections at the forefront.
Getting to know your co-workers is always a good place to start. When done well, virtual activities can build relationships, improve communication between teammates, and boost employee morale. However, we’ve been learning that virtual and online team building is very different from in-person team building!
Top 10 Team Building Activities and Ideas for Conference Calls in 2022
Take this as, not necessarily a definitive list but a highly opinionated “Top 10”… there are tons more options out there, and if these don’t suit you, just use your Google-fu and you can find plenty more.
If you’re a moderator or facilitator of a call, it’s also important to have a sense of who your team is, what your workplace culture is about, your meeting content (if not scheduling a team-building event specifically), and to be able to “read the room” and determine what kind of activities will get a positive response with your group. You can also always exercise some workplace democracy and poll a few activity ideas!
That said, here are some of our favorite ideas inspiring team-building activities for conference calls. We’re confident that they can help your team members engage and connect. Some of them are even versatile enough to work on audio calls! ( …for those who remember “conference calls” that mainly utilized telephones.)
We’re running down our top 10 list starting from “best ideas ever” down to “a terrific team building activity, but maybe not for everyone.”
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Team Lunch/Team Coffee
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Maybe you can’t do it in person, but it’s well known that eating together promotes team bonding. If schedules or time zones are a problem, you can adjust the meeting to coffee or a snack. It’s easy: get food (or drink), eat it in front of your camera, and talk to your teammates.
In our opinion, this is possibly the top way to get a team to connect. It’s straightforward, there’s nothing cheesy or contrived about it, and it’s a low-stakes, relatively-low-effort meeting (other than blocking off the time slot) where your people can let the conversation flow.
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Icebreakers
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Icebreakers only hit slot #2 because they’re such an elementary feature of meetings, both online and off. Good icebreakers can generally go about 30 seconds per participant and involve fairly softball “getting to know you” type questions. Examples could be “What did you have for breakfast?” or “What is your dream location for remote work?” The moderator or facilitator should volunteer to go first and generally help the conversation move along smoothly.
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“Two Truths and a Lie”
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You may have seen this before on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and it’s likely to be a hit in your conference call. Write down three statements, two of which are true and one is false. Read them out loud and give the call participants a minute to process and guess which are true and false. It’s an excellent way to communicate better with your co-workers and gather a little bit of their life stories that they want to share.
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Pancakes vs. Waffles
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This is a game based on friendly debate and unanimous decision-making. You declare that either pancakes or waffles will disappear from existence, and your team has to make the choice. It’s a great way to engage more introverted team members as well, both with the need for a unanimous decision and a trivial debate subject that anyone can easily weigh in on.
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60-Second Stories
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This can be both an exercise for “getting to know” you as well as in speaking succinctly during conference calls! Participants can relate a story (personal or otherwise) within a one-minute summary. You can relate your career background, an amusing anecdote, or other ideas at “sound bite” size and get the conversation flowing.
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Online Office Competitions
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We’ve mentioned before that gamification can be a great way to drive engagement in online meetings and events. This could work best as a small event on its own, scheduled similarly to a lunch or coffee break. Simply find a simple, fun, (and ideally work-related) competitive activity such as workplace-based trivia, solving a simulated problem, or generating ideas and pitches, and set up a team-based competition. Participants will learn a little bit more about their teammates’ strengths and weaknesses in competition, as well as teamwork and cooperation.
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“Something in Common”
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This is a great, and quick, team-building activity that encourages your team to learn more about each other. Break the team into small groups and have the groups identify 1-4 unique things they have in common. Co-workers may discover they have a shared love of theater, are bicycle enthusiasts, play piano, or otherwise have unexpected areas to connect.
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Healthy Lifestyle Challenge
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Desk Show & Tell
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“Camera Out Window”
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While we at Kaltura certainly endorse healthy living as a self-evident good, this is a bigger commitment than icebreaker questions, so proceed respectfully with your teammates!
That said, a great bonding activity (and also a definite positive influence during periods of at-home work) for teams who are game is to track some (relatively easy) healthy activities over the course of a month as a virtual challenge. Ideas can include drinking a specific amount of water each day, achieving step counts, engaging in a “physical activity of choice,” etc.
At the end of the month, the person with the most checkmarks on the spreadsheet wins, and hopefully, everyone on the team is at least a little healthier.
This activity and the next one come also with an asterisk as people may have concerns about displaying their remote work conditions for reasons varying from “My room is a mess” to “I’m currently in a sub-optimal remote working space.” (Though it’s also probably good practice to make sure your workspace, etc. are clean and orderly when you know you’ll have guests–even virtual ones!) Make sure to gauge interest and comfort level first!
But for those eager to be an open book about their remote work environment, this is a great “get to know you” activity! Give a brief guided tour of your working space and/or tell the story of a piece of artwork, accessory, or knick-knack you simply can’t be without while remote working. Everyone will learn a little bit more about remote co-workers’ tastes and quirks, personality, and state of mind.
Not everyone wants to put their room, home, work area, or neighborhood on display for every video call, or novelty video backgrounds wouldn’t exist. That said, for teammates who are comfortable, this allows your co-workers to catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar environment from the comfort of their own home. This could be particularly effective for widely geographically dispersed teams … let’s say one participant is physically present in rural Vermont, but maybe another is remoting in from Tokyo. Both can check out an exotic vista and play tourist for a few minutes, while meanwhile everyone present learns a little bit more about the people on their team.
Kaltura Conference Calls for Enterprise
On the subject of conference calls at enterprise level (especially video calls!), we’d like to introduce Kaltura Meetings, our best-in-class web-based meeting tool. Conference calls will be better quality and more user-friendly than ever before.
When remote teams need to work and conference call together, Kaltura Meetings’ ease of use lets your team join virtual collaboration spaces with one click. Participants can interact face to face from anywhere on any device, with no installations or downloads necessary, making team-building activities a snap. Our browser-based video conferencing also makes combining remote participants with in-person meetings simpler than ever before.
Some of our key features include active speaker focus during meetings, screen sharing, and HD video playback capabilities, built-in moderated chat for meeting participants, and collaboration tools such as virtual whiteboards and shared note-taking. If security is a primary concern, a range of authentication and authorization options are available on our platform, including SSO. The Kaltura platform supports two-factor authentication, encrypts data at rest, and provides outstanding security on every Kaltura instance. Make sure only the people meant to be in your virtual meetings are there and keep bad actors out! Lastly, we can additionally offer robust storage and hosting services operating from state-of-the-art data centers with high levels of stability, redundancy, and security.
Additionally, Meetings can be integrated easily into many software platforms you may already be using. Kaltura Meetings is also built to house persistent collaboration spaces—your team can pick up right where they’ve left off from last time. Collaboration tools keep the team focused and engaged, whether members attend in-person or remotely. Other features include cloud recording to Kaltura Video Portal so there’s a long-term record of projects and collaboration that everyone can keep up to date on. Video Portal can also offer options for automatic transcription, video editing, and analytics to take your virtual and hybrid meetings to the next level.
Final Thoughts
In short, there are myriad options for team-building activities during conference calls, these are just some of our favorites. We hope this has sparked inspiration to try some out or find favorites of your own! And keep in mind that a reliable and high-quality video meeting product is key in taking your team calls to the next level.
Ready to add some fun and connection to your next meeting?
Try Kaltura Meetings for free today!
