Remote work, or the work-from-home (WFH) setup, has been on the rise for the past few years.
It has shown various company and employee benefits like increased productivity, improved savings, less time on the road, and more family time, to name a few.
While this provides many benefits, the challenges it brings, particularly in the employees' physical and mental well-being, should not be disregarded.
We have listed 5 activities you can host to keep your team healthy, happy, and productive even if you are miles or even oceans away from each other.
Movie Night
A virtual movie night is one of the best ways to spice up a simple Friday evening. Or if you’re pressed for time, you can all agree to watch an interesting episode instead!
Get your snacks ready, dim your work lamp, and make yourself comfortable as you be spending the next hours giggling and relaxing with the people you’re talking about business with every day.
Having movie nights is effective in creating a lighter atmosphere and bringing out the personalities of your teammates, which will then contribute to a healthier work environment in the long run.
Scener, Vemos, and Watch Party are some of the best free streaming tools that you can use on your next virtual movie night!
Fitness Challenge
Healthy members are key to a happy and productive team.
A few ways to keep your employees fit and healthy are by reminding them to stay hydrated, eat healthy snacks, or by nudging them about their slouched posture.
These are simple reminders they will surely appreciate.
But if you are looking for a more engaging activity, you can try hosting a virtual fitness challenge or if you’re feeling less competitive, a simple fitness session.
This may include running, yoga, zumba, meditation, healthy eating, cycling, walking, etc. The possibilities are endless!
The goal of it is to encourage your members to exercise and move more.
More than the healthy competition it creates, exercising together can motivate each other as well. In fact, past studies have shown that people who are in a fitness group are less likely to drop out and are more likely to have greater mental benefits.
Truth or Dare
Get to know your workmates in a fun way with a classic game of truth or dare.
Relationships of any kind are best nourished with communication, honesty, and a good dose of laughter.
This simple activity is sure to open up a room for your team members to share their most memorable and embarrassing stories.
Ask about their hidden talents, what they’d do if they could switch bodies with the person they admire the most or ask them about the time they cried over an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend. Make it sweet and unpredictable!
This is an exciting way to chill out after a heavy work week; just make sure the list of your truths and dares are safe for work! 😉
Online Pictionary
Pictionary is a game where a player will draw a word and the other players will try to guess what it is.
It’s a great time for the artists in your team to show off their talents!
But really, you don’t have to be an artist to win this game.
As long as you can draw a stick man and have the wits to simplify a complicated figure, then you’re good. This thrilling game can boost your team’s creativity and competitiveness while having a fun atmosphere around.
You can host your virtual Pictionary games for free on websites like skribble.io, drawize.com, and sketchful.io
Coffee Session
After lengthy meetings, it will be a nice gesture to have a few minutes with your workmates talking about the fun things that happened during the day.
Jazz up your afternoon and spend your 5pm coffee with them!
It’s your time to formally introduce your snuggly, needy cat–yup, the little grey fluff behind the tail cameos on your video screen.
You can also ask about their side projects, the weather in their city, or anything not related to work.
It’s a good breather to not think about deadlines or talk about work for a while and simply enjoy the company of each other and discover each other’s less professional selves.
For us at Pro5, we’ve been lucky because we get to spend our e-gatherings at our virtual bar (and some of us seem to just stick around and do their work there too!).
Thanks to Virtual Chair for designing our cozy office space where we can be productive at work and our cool Pro5 Café where we can have a relaxing time during our catch-up chats.
You might only see a quarter of each other’s bodies during these silly games and catch-up sessions but simply being present can make everyone feel more involved and less alone.
Encourage your team to turn their cameras on and interact with one another.
Have fun and laugh over your Pictionary artworks, compliment your co-worker's new background view or clean-up attempt, listen to what they have to say about their weather, or simply say hello to their kids or pets.
Allotting time for virtual activities will surely strengthen the bond between you and your team which can enhance your overall productivity and teamwork.
But on top of the advantage, it brings to your company’s ROI, hosting these gatherings can give a more important benefit: a space for self-expression, stress release, and socialization. The core of it is and must be, the well-being and mental health of the individuals in your team.