Don't do virtual team building

Team building is recommended to keep the team spirit and the feeling of belonging to a company. But what happens when the majority of the teams are remote? Virtual team building is often seen as a good solution, so let's take a closer look:

The challenge of remote companies

The main challenge for remote teams is to create a real team cohesion as it would be done if the collaborators could meet around a coffee. The distance can be detrimental to the sense of belonging.

A trivial solution is often chosen so that no one falls into indifference or into a total depression: choose to propose a remote team building as a company activity. In this objective, many solutions are proposed, to allow the collaborators to meet in collective moments designed to remotivate themselves.

The importance of team building

Virtual team building is an online team bonding tool, which has been specifically designed for remote workers. The principle is generally an online digital event, on a platform that brings the whole team together around games, quizzes and other activities.

The objectives of remote team building are simple: have fun, build relationships and overcome difficulties. Because everyone's contribution is extremely valuable, remote workers will feel more involved and more valued. As with any team building, virtual team building is all about interaction and spontaneity.

But still. These activities have strong drawbacks, linked to their very concept:

• Isolation: Working remotely can already be isolating for employees, and remote team building activities can amplify this feeling of isolation by not allowing each team member to express himself, in the hubbub of the organized activity.
• Distraction: Team members may be more likely to get distracted or distracted during remote team building activities because they are at home or in a less structured environment than the office. Especially when many people are involved in the activity.
• Schedule occupancy: Remote team building activities are usually disconnected from a social time, and fall right into the middle of everyone's schedules, which calls into question their effectiveness for the organization.
• Shoot and forget: due to their cost, these activities are organized infrequently. Between two sessions, water has flowed under the bridge, the links have been relaxed, and finally the gains of the activity are quickly lost.

So what to do?

Don't do remote team-building activities!

On the contrary, every day should be an opportunity for employees to get to know each other better, to collaborate better. Team-bonding must be at the heart of the corporate culture, and the company must build, with its employees, a strategy that allows everyone to create and maintain relationships in a deep and recurrent way through one-on-one meaningful exchanges. It is the only sustainable solution to continue to develop a corporate culture, with all the benefits that this entails.