Employee morale is an absolutely essential part of any highly functioning team. Without it, your workers will produce less and be more inclined to look for work elsewhere, which is why it’s so important to keep your employee morale as high as possible. Any good manager knows this. But improving morale is easier said than done. That’s true enough in a traditional office environment, but it can be particularly challenging if your workers are spread out across different locations. That’s why we’ve compiled the following tips to help you improve morale with remote team-building activities.

How Your Employees Will Benefit from Remote Team Building

There are several advantages that come with remote team-building exercises:

• Your workers will feel more connected with each other and less isolated, even though they’re working on their own from a remote location.
• Employees generally feel more empowered and capable when they know they have the support of their coworkers.
• Teams generally enjoy much greater success when they are able to pool their strengths and collaborate together on projects. This results in higher productivity levels not only for the team, but for individuals as well.

Remote Team-Building Activities

Every team is different, so team-building activities that might be effective for one group of employees may not be for another. You know your own team, so it’s up to you to decide which exercises would be the best fit for your remote workers. What follows are some ideas that have worked well for other managers:

• A “break room” for remote employees – Some of the best working relationships are built when workers gather together for coffee in a break room. Although your remote workers can’t actually get together physically for a morning chat over coffee, they can participate in a virtual break room thanks to a variety of technological tools available to managers of remote employees. These shared spaces that team members access from their own home office computers allow them to build strong working relationships with coworkers, exchange ideas about current projects, as well as give remote workers a welcome break from their solitary daily routines.
• Remote training sessions and workshops – Most managers are familiar with setting up training courses for employees in a traditional office setting. But you may not know that many professional trainers now offer virtual workshops and classes that are specifically designed for remote teams. Not only will your employees benefit from the knowledge and skills that come from their training; it’s also a great way to build positive working relationships between team members.
• Virtual company events – It may be difficult (if not impossible) to gather all your remote workers together for a corporate-wide meeting, but you can still hold large-scale company events virtually. Conduct these in much the same way as you would if your team were to come together in a physical location: prepare an agenda, arrange for interesting speakers, include presentations that are interesting and pertinent to your staff members, and remember to include a question-and-answer session at the end of the meeting. Whether you use Zoom! or some other video conferencing software, conducting virtual company-wide events has never been easier thanks to today’s technological tools specifically designed for this purpose.
• Friendly competition – Setting up challenges for your remote team members can motivate your workers to boost their productivity levels. This kind of friendly competition can bring a team closer together. Just be sure that you set up the challenge so that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, and that you recognize each employee’s individual efforts as well as their successes.

Remote team-building activities can improve employee morale and help your team to become as productive as possible in their remote locations. Our MySammy cloud-based software is an excellent tool to help you establish your own team-building activities. MySammy measures employee productivity levels and is designed to be used with the full knowledge of the employee and without blocking websites or “spying” on your remote workers’ activities. Begin the process of setting up your own remote team-building exercises by signing up for your FREE trial of MySammy today!