Looking for ways to keep your culture in check and team feeling ‘connected' while working physically apart? In this session, I cover some of the best games for remote teams that we play together during our online social catchups.
We show you through this video how we keep remote work enjoyable for the whole team.
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Links:
– https://www.thegamegal.com/word-generator/
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How to Setup Games for Remote Teams
1. Set a schedule
So the first thing you need to do, I want you to not forget the social events that need to happen. So have them on a schedule.
Think of it as the online equivalent of Friday night drinks. We're just spending time with each other not talking about work. And there's a no-work talk rule – that's very important – to make sure that you're actually having genuine social time.
Now, it's never going to be the same as giving a colleague a hug, or having a one-on-one with someone in the corner of the bar or something like that. But it is at least going to get you close to keeping your team connected.
2. Set a game master
Before you start actually rolling out the games is to pick a games master. And the games master is the person who's going to be responsible for making sure that you've got games lined up.
They're going to research the best games for remote teams – there are heaps of lists online. I would recommend that person start looking at long-distance relationship websites because they happen to have great activities and great games that you can use to connect with teams at different locations. So that's where we've got some of ours from.
3. Setup a Zoom call or Google Meet
How do you actually communicate with your remote team?
You just jump on a Google Meet or a Zoom call. You get everyone on there, make sure it's scheduled, obviously, and then one person shares their screen. So you're probably going to be doing an activity where something, either a game, a piece of software or a Jamboard is actually shared on the screen.
If you've got one person with the best internet connection, or the fastest computer, or the biggest monitor, they're the person who is designated to share their screen into the group, and they're going to kind of be, they don't have to be the games master, that will just be someone who does that.
4. Setup the game
Now that you’ve got all of the prerequisites ready, there’s nothing else left to do but pick the best game and start playing with your remote team!
So what are the best games for remote teams?
Best games for remote teams to play
Pictionary with Google Jamboard
Want to have a drawing session with your remote team?
You can use the Jamboard for drawing.
Jamboard is actually an online collaborative space. It's a Google app. It's part of the Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) family.
Jamboard runs on your phone. It runs in the browser, it runs on your iPad, and it basically lets you draw, it's like a virtual whiteboard. Everyone can draw at the same time. Very, very cool software.
Pictionary using Google Jamboard can be one of the best games for remote teams to play. It’s highly interactive and easy to set up. Using Word Generators can simplify the setup even further. If you want to be adventurous with your team some NSFW word generators are also available.
Jackbox
Now there's one game company, and it's called Jackbox. And these guys make a bunch of games specifically for this purpose. They're designed for one person, or a group of people to play online, and share with each other. And they're really, really well designed, super easy to use.
You can just use your phone with the web browser on your phone. You don't even have to fire up an app. And Jackbox games, allow you to do either drawing, quizzes, silly word games, or trivia games. And they've got like 50 of them. There are so many games that they've designed, and they're all really interactive, and they're all really fun.
One of the best games for remote teams that you can play on Jackbox is one of my favourites – it is called Drawful.
Basically, you each take turns to draw something, you'll have a word that you have to draw. It'll be something silly.
You have to then draw it, and you just open up your phone and you go ahead and draw it, and then your team members will guess what it is, and whoever either gets the right guess, or if someone just puts in a really funny guess, everyone gets points and scores and those kinds of things, and it's obviously a competition.
Trivia Murder Party
Basically, you're competing against each other in a trivia game, but if you mess up, then people start dying.
Definitely check out Jackbox games. They're probably my favorites to start with. They do have a downside though, and that is that they are limited to eight people. So if you've got a larger team, you might need to use Zoom in like a breakout meeting, in a breakout room, or use multiple Hangouts.
Basically, they're unfortunately not going to allow you to have larger teams all in there in one place. So that's a bit of a bummer. But that's Jackbox games.
Charades
Okay, the next best game for remote teams is charades. And this one works really, really well. We've all got video cameras, why don't we get off the computer and actually play some games off the computer?
And so yes, charades are excellent. Again, you do it in team mode, where you'll have one or two or even four people acting, and then a certain number of people guessing.
You may even do it in teams. And so we like to do scoring and team points, especially if you've got a really big team. And so that works really nicely. Again, you can use the word generator. You can choose easy, medium, or hard and it's going to give you heaps of details there.
Real or fake
So one of the games was real or fake, where they gave us a word, and we had to decide whether that word was real, or whether that word was fake. But we did it in a game show style.
So what we did was we used a buzzer, and that buzzer was really cool. So it's called BuzzIn.live.This is an online buzzer.
What we did was we've got the real or fake game here, and the games master would put up the slide. This was the word, bumfuzzle. And we would have to choose whether it was real or fake, but it was a game show.
And so when you hit the buzzer, you got to go first. If they got it wrong, then it went onto the next person, and so on. That was a great game. That was absolutely excellent. Everyone was like hovering over the buzzers.
So there we have it, we have all of our favourite games. We're going to be sharing some more of this kind of stuff. If this is interesting to you, please let me know. Share your thoughts down below. I would love to know in the comments which one was your favourite, and which one are you most excited to have a go at.
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
