21 Fun Virtual Team Building Activities for Remote Teams

How Can I Make My Virtual Meeting More Fun?

Even if you are not teaching something, activities such as icebreakers can still be a great resource, especially in meetings.

To make virtual meetings more fun, I recommend using activities, to make participants more relaxed, to get some team building taking place, and to give participants (even if they are colleagues) a chance to further get to know each other.

With this in mind, the free virtual team building activities below are ideal for use online.

Virtual Team Building Activities Icebreakers

Without any further delay, let’s move into explaining the best virtual team building activities for remote teams by starting with the best online icebreakers you might wish to use.

1. Virtual Show and Tell

Number of participants: 4 or more.

Time needed: 20 minutes (i.e. allow 3 minutes per person but extend the timeline as needed according to participant numbers).

Intention: This is a wonderful virtual training activity to use as an icebreaker for team building and it involves the participants needing to talk about an item they have with them such as a photograph, an instrument, or anything at all.

They will explain the personal value and meaning of the object, where they bought it, and any information they can about the item.

This is great for helping participants learn something about each other and it helps with team inclusiveness, especially when you work with a hybrid team whereby some colleagues live in different countries and sides of the world.

As the organizer, you might want to lead the activity by introducing one item yourself and explaining all about it, so that everyone else can see how the activity works.

How to run the activity: In the meeting or class you have before this one, explain to participants that the next time you all meet online, they should have beside them an item that they wish to show the rest of the participants. If you cannot ask them beforehand, you might want to hold this activity after a break, so that they can choose an item during a break.

During the activity on the day, give each participant roughly 3 minutes and allow for 1 to 2 questions from the other participants for class engagement.

Large Groups: If you have a large group, and are looking for virtual team-building activities for large groups, this activity can be run in the same way by creating breakout rooms so that you have groups of 6 to 8 people in each and they explain their item within their group.

As the person managing the meeting/training, you can jump between groups and check on the progress.

2. One Word Story

The One Word Story activity that we also mentioned in the quick virtual team building activities is another excellent option when it comes to fun virtual team building activities.

Number of participants: 4 or more but 6 to 8 is ideal per group.

Time needed: 5 to 10 minutes

How to run the activity: To run this activity you will set a timer (stopwatch) for 3 minutes when you start.

One person will start off the activity by saying any one word. This one word will be the start of the sentence.

The next person will now add another word to the first word and you continue around the group with everyone adding a word. The trick is that together you should write and make a sentence and story and you have to try and do this as quickly as possible.

You want to see how many times you can go around the virtual group in 3 minutes and see how the story unfolds.

This can be a lot of fun as the story can take some weird and interesting directions and participants tend to love doing this activity.

After 3 minutes, after a short pause, you can start the activity again with someone different choosing the first word.

The group should see if they can go around the circle of participants more times this time.

Large Groups: If you have more than 10 participants, start dividing the participants into breakout groups and then run the activity in the same way.

The only difference is that someone without each breakout group will need to be the person timing the 3 minutes.

3. Virtual Coffee Break

Number of participants: Two or more participants. If a large group put them randomly into smaller breakout groups.

Time needed: I suggest 15 minutes but adapt as needed.

The virtual coffee breaks is of course pretty much the same as what would take place in the real world in person.

In this case, though, it’s a chance for participants from anywhere worldwide who are involved in the meeting to relax and have a natural conversation and to chat and learn more about colleagues.

There is no need for any structure of pre-planning as the organizer.

The only thing you might need to do is to randomly split people into sub-groups and place them in breakout rooms if you are dealing with a large group. In each group, I suggest having a maximum of 8 people.

If you do this you might want to change the groups after 10 minutes and have two 10-miute sessions.

If you manage a hybrid team, you might want to run a virtual coffee break at least once a week as this can aid team-building and team unity.

It also works well when trying to build an inclusive team as a manager because employees no matter where they are located, still get to be involved with this virtual team-building activity.

Furthermore, it can help reduce stress and loneliness for those colleagues working from home all the time.

If you feel it might be useful, you can set a theme for each coffee meeting, using a general theme that everyone is likely to have some interest in.

Topics related to hobbies, travel, food, and music can be good options to start with.

4. Where I Live Activity

Number of participants: 2 or more.

Time needed: 15 to 30 minutes (but extend as needed).

Intention: This is a nice easy icebreaker that you can use for virtual meetings for virtual teams. The concept is very simple in that this is about giving the participants a chance to learn something about each other, through learning about the place where they are based or presently located.

This is a great activity in terms of building an inclusive team and for team unity, as it helps virtual employees and those based in a specific location to all get to know each other better.

Understanding more about where each other is from and located can help also with intercultural communication in that we gain context of the culture of others and it can aid communication and understanding.

How to run the activity: Allow everyone in the virtual meeting 3 to 5 minutes each to introduce themself and their location and to talk a little about where they are located.

They might choose to talk about the history of the place, what they like about their location, why they choose to live or visit this place, or anything else they choose to say.

The other participants will then have the chance to ask questions to learn more. Allow everyone the chance to present their location.

5. Icebreaker Questions

Number of Participants 3 or more.

Time Needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: Sometimes the best and most fun virtual team-building activities are the simplest and using icebreaker questions is as simple as it gets.

Icebreaker questions can be great for bringing out fun facts about the individuals involved in the virtual meeting and such an activity tends to be very light-hearted and enjoyable.

How to Run the Activity: You will need to have a batch of icebreaker questions prepared and one of the easiest options is to grab some online such as the ones on this PDF.

One consideration though is that if you are holding a meeting or class virtually for a specific type of client or group, then you might want to tailor the questions accordingly.

If you are providing virtual training as a trainer facilitator for staff from a travel company, for example, then icebreakers related to travel will fit very well.

There are a few different ways to run this activity but I suggest asking one question to one person in the virtual training room and then when they have answered, asking the others to then give their input.

By asking each question first to a different person each time, you ensure that you include everyone and create an inclusive environment where no one is left out.

Large Groups: If you have a large group you might need to use breakout rooms. In this situation, you can allocate one person to be the question asker and you will need to email (or send in the chat facility) them the questions they will ask.

Fun Virtual Activities for Teams

6. Virtual Pictionary

Number of Participants: 5 or more.

Time Needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: This is another of those creativity-based activities that is great if you are providing training on topics such as communication skills like non-verbal cues. In terms of virtual team building activities, this is one of the classics.

How to Run the Activity: Before the virtual meeting, as the trainer or teacher, write down a list of words or phrases that participants will draw pictures of.

A good idea can be to use words/phrases that can be fun to draw i.e. words connected to movies, famous people, animals, or places for example.

I actually like to use the online Pictionary word generator as it makes the job even easier.

To get started, explain to the participants that they will take turns to choose a word/expression and then they have to try and draw something to express the word, and the other team members must try and guess what the word or phrase is.

The drawing can be done on a virtual whiteboard such as on Zoom or MS Teams and if your term was, for example, “Honolulu” you could draw palm trees and try and draw it inside a circle to signify it’s on an island.

Now, for the activity itself, divide participants up into teams of 4 or 5 (I suggest randomly so that you mix everyone up).

If you are using breakout rooms then one person will need to be the timer and they will allow 90 seconds for each drawing and for everyone to try and guess the word/phrase.

Then it is the next person in the team who draws and gradually everyone in the team will do a drawing.

It is worth emphasizing to participants that this is NOT about drawing skills but communication so they should not worry about drawing anything detailed as there will not be time anyway.

A correct answer for the team means 1 point is awarded to them. If you have several teams then they will compete to get as many words as possible in let’s say 10 minutes.

>> Take a look at the Managing Virtual Teams Teaching Materials

7. Online Trivia

Number of Participants: More than 2.

Time Needed: 20 Minutes (but adapt as needed).

Intention: Most of us are familiar with trivia games and this is very much the same only run in a virtual classroom or meeting room.

You might want to use trivia questions that relate to the specific audience you are managing or teaching online.

If you are providing virtual training for online doctors, for example, you could use medical trivia questions. Likewise, for a marketing team, you might make the questions more brand and business-related topics.

This activity can be great for some fun and healthy competition between colleagues or for getting colleagues to collaborate in teams.

How to Run the Activity: You can use a service such as Zoom Polls to capture everyone’s answers to see how the team does, or you can use a platform such as Quizizz. This makes it easier to track the scoring.

On some platforms such as Quizizz and Kahoot the great thing is that participants can answer in real-time via their own devices.

You can run this very simply though, especially if you are a relatively small team by having everyone submit their answers via chat or a shared document.

8. Virtual Scavenger Hunt

Number of Participants: 5 or more works well.

Time Needed: 15 to 20 minutes.

Intention: The Scavenger Hunt is one of the classic team building games and it works equally as well when run online virtually, as it does when used in person in a classroom.

The idea of this training exercise requires team collaboration and requires participants to get creative, while it is also a fun activity in a virtual environment.

How to Run the Activity: As the training coordinator, you will need to prepare a list of items that you are going to ask participants to find in their own homes.

The list can include to find things such as:

• an item of a specific color
• made of a certain material
• an item such as a cat (so they might have a cat fridge magnet, calendar, or an actual cat).
• something from their school days

>> To save you time I have created a Virtual Scavenger Hunt PDF Items List that you can use.

Try and make the list quirky and fun (or use the one I created above for you). If you use the list I created just adapt it to have fewer or more objects as needed.

After the 10 or 15 minutes are up and the participants are back on screen with the items they found, they should choose 5 of the objects to show the group virtually and explain each object and its value to them.

They will also count the number of items they successfully found in the allocated time.

Another variation on this is to separate people into teams of 4. Place them in breakout rooms and then the 4 work together to complete the list i.e. 5 items each.

They will though need to collaborate and work together to ensure they do not repeat the same items so it will be a combination of showing up in the breakout room and searching in their home for the items.

Once back in the main room, each person can show the 5 items they found for their group. If an item on the list is repeated though then they get deducted a point if you are scoring the task so that one group wins.

9. The Active Listener Challenge

Number of participants: Any number.

Time needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: If you are providing virtual classes or workshops teaching managers or employees then the ‘Active Listener Challenge’ is a good option.

How to run the activity: This exercise is very simple to run in that as the teacher/trainer/manager you will read out a short story that has a lot of facts in it. Spend 3 to 5 minutes reading the story.

You should emphasize during the story that they are NOT allowed to make any notes. They must try to listen carefully,

You will then ask 12 questions (you can include as many questions as you wish so adapt as needed) and the participants will write down their answers either on paper at home or they can write their answers on a shared board.

After asking the questions, tell the story again, emphasizing the answers as you go.

Ask participants to then say how well they did and if you wish, you can allow for a 3 to 5-minute general chat about the activity.

10. Aliens at Work

I love using the Aliens activities (such as the Aliens at Dinner activity) so this is an adaptation of that one.

The premise of this activity is that you split a team of 5 or 6 people into two small groups i.e. 3 and 3 and one group represents the aliens and the other the humans.

You can allocate a given time say 10 minutes and the aliens have to ask the humans a series of questions to try and understand why they do certain things.

In this case, you can use a work situation, although you can change it to dinner or holiday or any situation as you wish.

The questions will try to get to the root cause of why something is being done as though the aliens have no understanding at all of how humans work.

So if the work situation is about a team having to design a marketing campaign for a new pair of shoes, the starting questions might for example be:

• What are shoes?
• Why do they go on your feet?
• Why do humans have feet?

This can be a hilarious activity and always generates a lot of laughter.

Virtual Team Building Activities for Learning Problem-Solving

11. Emoji Story

Number of Participants: 5 or more.

Time Needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: If you are looking to promote creative thinking and communication skills and combine it with a great virtual icebreaker activity, then the emoji story activity can be a great option.

Younger employees particularly seem to enjoy this activity as it involves developing a short story using ONLY emojis.

How to Run the Activity: Explain to the participants in your virtual meeting room that they each need to create a story using only emojis and the story basically will be very short.

I suggest guiding them toward Emojipedia as it makes it easy for them to construct the story or they can use their smartphone.

Give them a specific question to answer such as:

• What did you do today?
• What will you do on the weekend?

Now give participants 5 minutes to create their short story using only emojis.

After the 5 minutes, one by one the participants will paste their emoji story into the chat (or add a photo of the emoji story) and the rest of the participants must try and guess the story.

As the teacher/trainer you might want to choose one person each time to try and guess the story so that everyone gets involved and has a chance to try and work out a story as well as provide one.

12. Two Truths and a Lie

Number of Participants: As long as you have three or more participants in the virtual classroom, you can run this activity.

Time Needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: This is a classic team-building activity and game that works well both in virtual meetings and classes and in person and it’s good fun and participants tend to love this activity.

It is also great for seeing if you can read other people’s body language in a virtual setting.

How to run the activity: In this activity (another great option to use as a virtual icebreaker) participants will have to think of three statement about themself. Two of these statements will be true and one will be false.

After a person has read out their statements, everyone else in the virtual room must discuss and decide which statement they believe is a false statement.

The person who read the three statements will then reveal to the rest of the group which one was the false statement i.e. the lie.

Each person will read out their three statements and have a chance to see if they can trick the others.

As the meeting or training facilitator, you might want to give an example of two positive and a false statement so you might even want to be the first person to read aloud three statements such as if you said:

1. I once ran the NYC marathon
2. I met a famous musician
3. I once had dinner with a well-known TV presenter

13. Virtual Escape Room

Number of participants: No limit.

Time needed: Depends on the escape room being used.

Intention: This can be great for getting employees to work together and to learn to collaborate and learn about problem-solving.

How to run the activity: There are numerous online services that provide virtual escape rooms for teams and this can be the easiest way to run this particular activity.

You might need a little bit of budget but services such as WeAreWildGoose can be good.

The Virtual Escape Rooms follow pretty much the same process as you would do in person, i.e. as a team you must solve a range of puzzles and challenges in order to escape the room.

14. Dumbest Idea First

Number of participants: 3 or more people.

Time needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: Also used in the 12 problem-solving activities list, the ‘Dumbest Idea First’ is a fun activity that looks at problem-solving from a different angle from normal.

Rather than coming up with an actual solution to a problem, this activity is aimed at pushing creative and innovative thinking by getting participants to think in different ways.

How to run the activity: Make up a one-sentence scenario for the participants such as “Your department needs to create a brand new product that has never been designed before).

Explain to the participants that they will need to come up with 10 of the dumbest ideas they possibly can, and they have 10 minutes as a group to do this.

Break participants down into small groups of 4 or 5, place them in breakout rooms, and give them 10 minutes to do this task.

After the 10 minutes, bring everyone back into the main virtual meeting area and have each group explain 3 of their dumbest ideas to the larger group.

Together as a group, they will then agree on the 3 dumbest of all ideas and then vote on the number one dumbest idea.

The idea here is intentionally to come up with the craziest idea.

Virtual Team-Building Games for Large Groups

It’s always useful as a virtual trainer also to have some virtual team building activities for large groups ready to use, so here are a couple that you might find useful.

15. Guess that Song

Number of participants: Any number.

Time needed: I would suggest allowing 20 minutes but this is flexible and easily adapted.

Intention: An easy-to-run activity that works well for large groups.

How to run the activity: For this activity you play the first 5 seconds of a number of songs and the participants have to guess the song title.

If you wish the participants themselves can take turns to share their choice of songs.

Participants guess the name of the song by writing in the chat box their answers and the first correct answer wins each round.

16. This or That

Number of participants: Any number and it’s suitable for large groups.

Time needed: 20 minutes.

Intention: This is one of the virtual team building activities that works well for any sized group, so even if you have 80 or more participants, this activity still works well for remote sessions.

With this activity, participants have to choose one of two options, ‘This or That’. It works as a good icebreaker and online team building activity activity.

How to run the activity: You will need to prepare a small list of ‘This or That’ questions that you can use for the activity. Try and have an array of varied questions to make it interesting for all participants whatever their interests.

The list only needs to be very simple and some examples are:

• Hawaii or Iceland??
• Online learning or classroom training?
• Living for a month in an igloo or a rainforest?
• Chocolate cake or fruit salad?
• Working from home or working as you travel?
• Electric car or petrol/gasoline car?

For large groups, use the random allocation feature to place people into groups in breakout rooms randomly in groups of 6 or 8.

Give each group the first question from your ‘This or That’ list and then allow the group/s 3 or 5 minutes to discuss the two options. As a group, they might vote and choose their option.

Go through your list of questions.

Afterward, bring everyone back together in the main virtual meeting room and ask the teams which of the two options they chose for each, with the team leader for each group giving their results.

17. Charades

Number of participants: 8 and no upper limit i.e. suitable for big and large groups.

Time needed: 15 minutes (but adapt as needed).

Intention: This fun virtual team-building exercise is great for bringing participants together, especially as an icebreaker. This replicates the offline version of Charades and works well for team-building sessions.

How to run the activity: Beforehand you will need to create a simple list of charades prompts and these can be anything you want although typically the names of films, popular phrases, or the names of famous celebrities always work well for charades.

I suggest explaining to the participants that one person on each team (we will be dividing people into smaller groups when the activity starts) will start by acting out one of the prompts that they will be given. The others in their group then have 2 minutes to guess the word/phrase.

To provide each person with their term you can, as the facilitator, send each person 3 words/phrases by email beforehand.

The trick is that the person acting out the word cannot speak verbally and must use non-verbal communication to try and convey the word.

For every successful word guessed the team awards themselves one point.

Each person in the team will take turns and depending on how quickly they guess the answers correctly, there may be time most likely for 2 words each to act out.

If you wish to, you can make this charades activity i.e. by making it more specific to the work that the participants do or by using something such as a travel theme to make it fun.

When starting the activity itself, divide the team into groups of 7 or 8 by automatically allocating them to breakout rooms.

After the time you allocate is up, bring the teams back to the main virtual meeting room and ask each team to give their score.

I like to announce the winner as the team with the lowest score for their honesty and effort.

18. Collaborative Map

Number of participants: More than 10. The more the better though so ideal for large and big groups.

Time needed: 15 minutes.

Intention: This I find is always a fascinating and interesting exercise for interactive virtual team-building.

This activity can be adapted to different themes but the main point of this activity is that participants get to build a travel experience map together.

It can be an interesting exercise to see where people have been and what they’ve done and it can be a great conversation piece. This can be one of the most engaging virtual team building activities.

How to run the activity: As the facilitator you will need to decide what type of maps you will use i.e. is it a map of the USA, Europe, or a world map, for example?

Beforehand you will also need to choose what mapping tool to use i.e. some options that work well are Google My Maps or MapHub.

To start the activity, explain that everyone will add to the map so if the theme is cities I have visited in Europe (outside of my home country) then participants will pin the places they have been to.

Alternatively, it might be that people also have to pin where they are from, and in this case, you might see some employees coming from certain cities that others wish to visit.

You can use these collaborative maps even to add photos, notes, etc so it is up to you as the facilitator how in-depth and how long you want participants to do this activity.

There are numerous options for this activity i.e. you can have people interested in a specific city go off into breakout rooms and allow them say 5 to 10 minutes to discuss the place of interest.

19. Five Finger Showdown Activity

Number of Participants: Any number including very large groups.

Time Needed: 15 minutes.

Purpose: This is a simple activity that can easily be used for large groups.

How to Run the Activity: Ensure that before the session you have a list of questions that ask participants if they have done something or experienced something.

Let me give you a couple of examples of questions:

• What are your 5 favorite places worldwide?
• Name five of your favorite movies or books.
• Share five personal goals you have for this year.

Then as you ask them a question, they must give 5 answers and each finder represents one answer.

So if you asked them their 5 favorite places in the world, they would name a place and then show one finger more and show a hand of 5 fingers after 5 answers.

You can have a list of questions so if you have a big group, divide them into automatically breakout rooms and one person in the group can ask the questions you send them on the virtual chat.

20. Never Have I Ever

Number of participants: Any number including very large groups.

Time needed: 20 minutes

Intention: This is a popular icebreaker that works well for virtual training and business meetings online and can be used for large groups.

This is another of my favorite virtual team building activities because it is always a lot of fun for the participants.

How to run the activity: You will need to prepare a list of questions that act as prompts and are “Never Have I Ever” statements.

Note that if you do have a large group then put them into breakout rooms once the activity starts. I suggest using the random allocation feature to place them in breakout rooms to save any time manually allocating them to rooms.

Explain to the participants that each person will take turns saying a “Never Have I Ever” statement (such as I have “Never been to a live Formula One motor race”).

If a participant has indeed done what is mentioned in the statement, then they can send an emoji in that chat to signify they have done this statement i.e. been to a live Formula One race. Or they can put their hand up.

Every time they match a “Never Have I Ever” statement, they lose one point.

You can decide whether participants start with 5 or 10 points, depending on the size of the class and the allocated time.

The game ends when someone announces that they have no points left.

21. Themed Picture Sharing

Number of participants: No limit as you can use breakout rooms if needed to create smaller groups.

Time needed: Time is flexible so you decide although 15 minutes can work well.

Intention: This is great for helping participants get to know each other better so it’s a great virtual team-building icebreaker.

How to run the activity: Beforehand, if you have contact with the participants, ask them to have ready for the session one to five photographs to share in the meeting/activity.

You might want to decide on a theme for the picture sharing so it might be work-related, travel, hobby, or family-related.

Hobby and interests-related themes I find can be the most interesting because it gives participants a chance to get to know something interesting about each other.

Give each person 3 minutes to show their photographs and to explain something about them and why they chose those photographs.

Give each person a chance to do this and if a large group then breakout rooms of 6 or so people can work very well.

Teaching Managers How to manage Virtual teams

Did you find these virtual team building activities useful?

We have a few more in the ‘Managing Virtual Teams Teaching & training materials’. The materials are instantly downloadable and include the PowerPoint slides and lesson plans so please check them out below.

Owner at Symonds Research Training Materials

Valeria has a PhD in Sociology, has 25 years+ working in education, has taught at the University of Bath &Cardiff Metropolitan University, & Hankuk University (Korea) & worked as a researcher for Exeter University, & has many years of industry experience including with Cardiff University in management roles. She now creates training course materials courseware.

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