Your employees are your biggest asset. Therefore, the top priority for every business is to ensure the team can work together without issues. Bringing people together behind the same objectives and mission is instrumental for growth. 

Teambuilding exercises are a useful strategy to help employees get to know each other and build trust relationships. Similarly, ensuring that people feel treated equally compared to team members will also help establish trust. The last thing you want is for talented employees to quit because they feel left out. 

However, post-pandemic work environments have created new challenges. Bringing your team together can be tricky when everyone works in the same office. Yet, in a world of virtual offices and remote teams, togetherness and teambuilding take a different meaning. How can you ensure your team is able to work and communicate effectively when nobody gets to sit together physically? 

Give them an IT network they can trust

Working from home means that your team needs to be able to access their work online, rapidly, smoothly, and safely. making the work network accessible for your remote team means you need to focus on different factors:

• Around the clock accessibility
• Not dependent on location
• Fully secure without affecting day-to-day projects

As full service IT expert Equipment HQ explains, continuity is paramount to effective and productive collaboration. Your employees need to be able to trust their hardware and the provided network infrastructure in their everyday tasks. Unequal IT performance will affect teamwork and team bonding. 

Focusing on one-to-one catch up meetings

One-to-one meetings are instrumental in supporting employees and creating an engaging business culture. Even with a remote team, it is essential to maintain time for one-to-one interactions between managers and their teams. This regular catch-up enables the business to support the employee by reviewing performance, understanding their needs, and building individual growth plans. There is no valid reason for abandoning these routine meetings with a virtual team. On the contrary, they can help make new members feel part of a team and develop the skills they need to move their careers forward.

Additionally, it is also an essential interaction to take the temperature in the business. Even a high performing team can experience isolation and depression in a remote environment. Regular catch-ups provide a chance to identify invisible issues before they can affect the business.  

Introduce virtual social events

Spending quality time together means that people can naturally improve their collaborative performance. Yet, there is no such thing as an impromptu coffee break in the kitchen area in a virtual environment. Therefore, it is essential to create social events that are fit for purpose. An online social event can be a playful interaction between team members, such as an online Guess Who game or an avatar-led escape room experience. Yet, many employees feel that social events can affect their flexibility. They may not want to join the business on a Zoom meeting outside their working hours. Should you consider moving the social event during working hours? It could be just as disrupting. Instead, it’s a good idea to consider different options. Some team members may love an online escape room. Others would prefer social interactions that are not time-bound such as a business Spotify playlist where they can add their favourite songs whenever they want. 

Togetherness across time and distance, it is the new challenge post-pandemic work environments bring to teambuilding. Nevertheless, with the right technology and mindset, teams can build strong bonds even when they never meet physically.