When you spend the better part of your day huddled in front of a computer screen or staring at large monitors, it is easy to feel isolated/lonely during lunchtime. Not being able to share an office with your peers means you are not able to have impromptu chats during lunch breaks.
This also means you miss out on the opportunity of breaking bread with your teammates. In fact, research has shown that taking lunch breaks with co-workers (or even discussing work during lunch) can help improve productivity and morale at work after!
As the team’s manager, how then could you keep your employees continually bonding? Below are a few virtual team building ideas!
Ethnic cuisine day
It is important to celebrate diversity in any organisation. And quite possibly the best way to do so is to try another culture’s cuisine!
Having an employee that belongs to another culture select a restaurant, choose the dishes and explain the food for your team would be eye-opening.
This is not only fun to do — but something that would expand your employee’s knowledge and understanding of the world.
Diet accountability
Try this diet accountability activity, where the goal is for employees to account for each other’s diet goals.
Having each person explain what they are cutting out of their regular meals, why they are doing it and how they are feeling about it would not only offer insights into your team members’ lives — but also give clues on who might need help in other areas.
Share your opinions!
Create a forum! Allow employees to share a news article and facilitate discussions. This would prove valuable in bringing togetherness within a team — even when disagreements occur.
In such a manner, professional development could be controlled and nurtured without hurting employees painfully.
Lunch dates
Managers could try creating breakout rooms for employees randomly, in hopes that colleagues who rarely interact socialise with one another.
This is particularly helpful if you observe ‘cliques’ forming within the office. This could ostracise or endanger new or isolated employees — potentially leading to a brain drain.
Geoguesser
Much like watching a streamer play video games; managers too can engage their team by playing a game like Geoguesser.
In this game, players are given a random location on Google maps for which they had to find out where they were. This game is simple enough as the navigation would only consist of Google street view and the app’s own UI.
Employees can easily partake by chiming in with guesses or requesting the manager to zoom in on certain features. This would be a fun lighthearted game for office lunches.
A meetup is always better than
Of course, meeting in person is always better than socialising online. A meetup once a month or so would be warmly welcomed by employees. You might even want to consider a corporate retreat!
However, with the current pandemic, this becomes extremely unlikely for larger teams. Still, managers must continue to be creative to continually keep their teams productive and happy — especially when a huge chunk of the work is now done virtually among many industries!
