Since the start of the global pandemic, ads selling tools for virtual team building blew up on the internet. Fancy interfaces and tricks to monitor your remote colleagues appeared everywhere, while everyone had some words of advice to keep your virtual team happy and productive. Before this proliferation of secret strategies for virtual team bonding activities, one old-fashioned method always worked: slack games.
Everyone working on a computer has heard of Slack. Easy to adjust to your team scale and workflow, Slack is the first choice for thousands of virtual teams and remote companies. As a virtual workplace, you can create different channels to work on several projects and keep track of other people’s activities.
This chat platform is, however, much more than an alternative version of Whatsapp for distributed teams. It’s a virtual workplace to build company culture and bond with your team across the globe.
How Do You Make Slack Fun?
Remote teams use Slack for quick communication and group chat to organize and plan daily tasks. Visibility is one of Slack’s key benefits. Everyone in the teams can see who is on and participate in group chats. Rather than monitoring team members, on Slack you can show when you are around, even for games!
In the era of lockdowns and perpetual quarantine, remote work can feel isolating, and it seems more complicated to create moments for casual conversation or unanticipated occasions to bond. But this is only true at first glance!
User profiles and bios can be the first step to having fun. Your team can get to know each other by adding personal or funny info to their profile. In addition to contact info and working hours, add your favorite movie or food, or even your personality type. Make it fun!
And this is just the beginning. Besides being a great communication tool, Slack has fun games for distributed teams.
Old-fashioned Slack Games
Do you remember the time when you pretended to study or pay attention at school, when in reality you were playing games with your classmates behind a raised textbook or beneath the desk? Slack is one of the most innovative communication tools, but it keeps an old-fashioned taste for immortal games, such as Hangman or Rock Paper Scissor. Or you can have a quick round of Trivia. Or you can set up a challenge with your colleagues at Tic Tac Toe and ConnectFour. Once you install the specific app, the match can last through the day, and you can play from different time zones — even better than when in school!
Humor And Your Slack Workplace
One of the pillars to build a strong company culture is a shared sense of humor — or the total absence of it, in some cases. People across the world might have different backgrounds and sensibilities, but we come together for the right joke. Gifs to Gifs is the online Slack version of Cards Against Humanity. Instead of piling cards, virtual team members post gifs in a dedicated Slack channel, choosing themes or… a random victim in your team!
If your team is more into Sherlock Holmes-style fun, you can have a go with React to the Fact, where players decide if a statement or a fact is true or not. When you want to get creative, One Word at a Time is a collaborative game to write a story bit by bit with your team members. The first player starts with a single word, the others follow, write another word, and vote the best word for this collective story — ‘till the storyteller writes ‘THE END.’
Virtual Team Building Activities
Creating virtual water coolers or engaging in spontaneous conversations can look more challenging than an office. But we already said that’s just the first impression! Answering Slack icebreaker questions is a funny solution to take a break and catch up with your colleagues with a pool or quizzes — rather than let your cat take you on the sofa, as it usually happens!
Games with direct questions like This or That or Would You Rather or Family Feud are a great way to keep questions light and fun engaging with all the members. Decode the emoji is another fun challenge that deals with encrypted messages and emojis.
Slack Online
With Slack, you can go online connecting to Spotify and share ‘working from home’ music to help relaxing or concentrate, or post news from Twitter to keep your team updated and talk about what is happening around the world! Finally, Meme Bot is the best for a channel full of team members. You can generate memes on multiple topics and just get creative with your team’s sense of humor!
Time To Use Slack For Fun Games!
Working in a virtual team spread across different countries is different from working in an office — without a doubt! But that doesn’t mean that virtual teams can’t be just as fun! There are always ways to decompress with Slack games during working hours, no matter how far you are from each other. And in these lockdown days, Slack can be your secret escape while staying home!
