Can you trust the people you work with online? It can be tough to build trust in a virtual setting, but it’s important for team morale and productivity.
That’s why trust building exercises for virtual teams are a vital pillar in your online business strategy.
Thankfully, in this article, you’ll learn nine virtual trust building activities, which foster trust and improve communication, problem-solving, and collaboration skills among remote workers.
Therefore, these activities will help your remote teams learn, be practical, improve the working process, and thus improve overall performance from a personal level. Have a look!
Set Up a Virtual Trust Building Exercise
First, choose the digital platform to use during the fun activity. Consider, zoom, google meet, skype, or any other platform that suits the virtual activity. For instance, zoom offers a good screen-sharing option for a successful virtual team.
Thus, consider these three keynotes in selecting trust-building activity:
Objectives and Purposes
To set up a practical exercise, define their objectives and purposes. For instance, you can choose a particular exercise with the team members struggling with isolation in mind.
Also, go for the activity that shows you trust the work of team members who struggle with quality assurance; like giving constant feedback.
Therefore, you can show them areas to improve through a team-building activity like a masterclass.
The outcome of any trust-building activity should meet your purpose and objective.
Consider Time
Also, consider time by choosing time-sensitive tasks since some quizzes take more time than simple icebreaker questions. An excellent choice is having simple questions before your team meetings.
Personalities and Cultural Expectations
Consider participants’ personalities and their cultural expectations. For instance, choose the activities that challenge introverts and moderate extroverts because introverts can get overly silent, and extroverts may take over.
Also, avoid the ones that don’t meet the cultural expectations of participants. That’s because icebreakers may get annoying. By considering cultural expectations, you avoid being offensive, like challenging one’s religion,
The choice you’ll make here doesn’t mean that introverted workers won’t find it challenging to engage in, say, discussions. But you can tell the participants the challenge’s objectives and encourage them to achieve those goals.
9 Trust Team Building Activities for Your Remote Team
Here are nine remote trust-building activities to consider that foster remote team trust.
Exercise 1: Offer Trust From Start
Consider this example: By the fact that you’re reading on, it means you trust this article to help you get trust-building activities for your virtual team from the start to the end, right? Well, yay! I earned your trust, hopefully.
In the same way; don’t expect automatic trust from your team. You have to provide it immediately, whether in a specific task or after hiring them.
How can you provide trust immediately to your team? Consider communicating the trust verbally through encouragement, congratulate where it’s due, and give them constant feedback.
Also, provide growth opportunities and show them that you trust their work. That is not the opposite of correcting where they go wrong. That way, you’ll have a happy and trusting team.
Exercise 2: Virtual Awareness: Teaching for the Right Online Team
As a manager, you know how crucial hiring the right crew is as not everyone can work virtually. Therefore, notice this manager-employee trust from the start.
Here’s how awareness teaching works: it aims to have full-time independent and self-directed workers. They must have virtual communication skills because remote teams rely on timely communication.
You can have a team masterclass to sharpen your skills with that in mind. Here you share the screen in the video conference platform and have team members contribute their thoughts on the points given.
Also, consider taking this chance to interact about each member’s home office state, working style, time management, and conflict and collaboration approach.
Exercise 3: Virtual Escape and Chat Room
A virtual chat room is like the icebreaking office interaction over tea or lunch, where members can talk to one another freely.
You can also use it to join with other team members and complete tasks, find clues, or solve various puzzles.
Also, there are virtual escape room games like The Lost Labyrinth, which comes with a game guide. These games may take you an hour but are full of fun for your team bonding. Consider having an instructor to avoid getting stuck.
Exercise 4: Four Truths and a Lie
If your virtual team is unfamiliar with each other, use the four facts and a lie for virtual team building.
Here’s how the game works: individuals share four truths about themselves and a realistic lie. For instance, a fab can be that you went snorkeling, swam with dolphins, and did not wrestle with sharks.
Here, consider using bingo cards, plain paper, and a pen or MS docs or Office for the game. Then share screens with the other remote teammates as you type. Using MS docs or Office is ideal for a small team.
Afterward, give each other time, say, 20 minutes of composition, then start. The instructions are after you write the facts and a lie, every group member takes turns guessing which is the lie and what’s true.
You can have prizes for the first member to mark correctly for three people or continue with it as a just-for-laughs-and-trust-building kind of activity.
Exercise 5: Mapping Out Each Member’s Location Together
Mapping out is where you create a map using google maps and allow editing where each member indicates their location.
Mapping out your locations helps appreciate your team’s diversity. I)t’s fun where specific locations spark conversations in the team.
Picture this: having gone on a vacation to a particular destination, and one of your remote team members happens to be a resident of that location. Or, your team members come from the location but didn’t know.
THE EXPERIENCE IN THIS KIND OF TALK IS PRICELESS! Let alone the fact that you guys can hang out during happy hours, right?
Also, you can turn it into a virtual team-building scavenger hunt! How? A team member mentions their current location, and the other team members locate the place in the maps.
Exercise 6: Encourage Transparency as Your Company Culture
You are the critical company culture maker for your virtual teams. Therefore, keep the employees aware of team information like work progress, task status, and work schedules for transparency.
Also, consider encouraging salary transparency as a means of forward-thinking and trust-building. It’s not like employees have to disclose their income to other workers. Instead, you can give a range of the highest and lowest as motivation and encouragement.
Exercise 7: Have Open Communication Lines
When your team can communicate openly, you encourage collaboration, motivation, accountability, and commitment.
Also, ensure that your team can reach each other by setting realistic response times among distributed teams. Here consider each individual since some come from different time zones.
Imagine this: where a task is challenging, and you need to consult with a teammate. You can only rely on the one who responds immediately and not the one who replies 24 hours later. Therefore, be sure to encourage presentness.
Exercise 8: Trust Building Using Nostalgic Icebreakers
Nostalgia is a sweet emotion to foster team-building trust. In nostalgic icebreakers, you will ask everyone to take turns answering childhood questions.
However, be sure they don’t trigger negative emotions as some may have traumatizing childhood experiences. How? Ask whether everyone is okay with answering those questions.
Some virtual team-building questions to consider are sharing a favorite childhood memory, best childhood present, growing-up role models, the best birthday, life highlights, favorite childhood photo, etc.
Exercise 9: A Virtual Happy Hour Trivia
Host a virtual happy hour trivia game! Similar to the icebreaker “Build a Pictionary Team”, you can host virtual trivia or fun facts about your industry.
Provide questions for participants to answer, and award points based on how many answers each team gets right.
Also, virtual trivia can include activities that revolve around typical daily team activities. For example, what’s the manager’s name, and how many remote employees does the team have, among others.
Trust is an excellent pillar in promoting team cohesion. The primary virtual team-building challenges like feeling isolated and insecure about work quality can inform your decision on the types of activities to engage in with your team. Happy trust-building activities!
