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In 2025, 14% of global companies operate fully remotely, while around 83% have adopted hybrid models as their default. According to Gallup’s 2025 workplace report, 75% of remote-capable employees expect to work from locations outside the office at least part of the time. Is that insight good for your business?
Remote mode needs a new approach to keeping productivity and a positive work culture. The main task is to create connections between colleagues located on the opposite sides of the globe. Building trust and alignment across time zones directly impacts retention, decision-making speed, and delivery quality.
Actually, that transformation would be worthwhile even without switching to distance working. So it is a new stimulus for business growth rather than a roadblock. And that’s where virtual team building activities come into play. It acts as a scalable tool to shape culture in distributed environments.
Remote But Not Disconnected: Making Culture Work Across Time Zones
After speaking with several tech founders this year, one theme kept surfacing: remote team alignment is the hardest part of scaling. The main concern is being present. And you won’t get that if people only show up for standups and code reviews. Flexibility is great, but without human connection, even high-performing teams drift.
Nowadays, people know their overseas colleagues much better than their neighbors. People naturally find common ground, working on projects about 8 hours a day together. But we’ve learned the hard way: shared tasks don’t automatically mean shared trust. If you hire remote software developers across regions, the gaps in connection widen fast unless you build habits around recognition and reflection. That’s where remote team building earns its place as a retention tool. Think of it as cultural infrastructure.
Introduce small rituals that actually stick, like personal wins during all-hands, rotating demo hosts, or project retros that include feedback on team dynamics. These habits drive virtual team engagement without forcing ‘fun’ into overloaded calendars.
Lifehacks from Outstaff Your Team
#1
From what we’ve seen, variety matters more than frequency. Some teammates prefer fast-paced games, others lean toward storytelling or shared learning. Instead of forcing everyone into one format, rotate low-barrier options. For example, suggest async icebreakers one week and live sessions the next. The goal isn’t just entertainment, but rather to give everyone a chance to connect in a way that feels natural. That’s how team building activities for remote teams stick and actually build culture, not just moments.
#2
Participation has to be enabled. A surprising number of remote employees skip activities not because they’re uninterested, but because they lack clarity or access. We always check that every newcomer has working gear, time-zone aligned invites, and clear expectations for what to expect. A bit of prep removes awkwardness and makes room for true engagement.
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24 Best Remote Team Building Activities
We’ve gathered 24 ideas for remote team building, which:
Inject energy, fun, and collaboration into your virtual workspace;
Create mutual memories;
Easily take root in the company as part of a sustainable approach to team building for remote workers.
Upskillers
📍Remote Workshops. Arrange virtual workshops led by team members to share hands-on experience on topics relevant to their current stack or sprint. Think live debugging sessions, technical demos, or real-case postmortems. These are easy wins for team building for remote teams, as they combine learning with shared storytelling from recent project wins or near-misses.
📍Collaborative coding. The most popular IDEs now support real-time pair or mob programming. Try co-creating the code. Whether you're troubleshooting an edge case or building a prototype together, these sessions become anchors for remote employee bonding, especially when pairing juniors with seniors across time zones.
📍Code reviews. It’s not just about spotting bugs anymore. Code reviews have evolved into structured peer-feedback rituals. They help engineers sharpen communication, frame feedback respectfully, and understand how others approach problem-solving. When done consistently, they support technical growth and create a rhythm of constructive interaction that strengthens team dynamics.
Team building only works if it’s useful beyond that day. We use tools like DISC or PQ, so teammates can explore how their strengths and stress behaviors show up in real scenarios. That’s when conversations become real, and collaboration gets easier.
CEO & Mental Fitness Expert,
Better Brain Project
Icebreakers
📍Human Onboarding. Start to shorten the distance right from the start. Conduct onboarding not for show but for easy team integration. Here are some pillars of the Outstaff Your Team onboarding services: personalize initial training programs for different roles and ask newcomers about their impressions of the process. This helps set the tone for transparent feedback loops and signals from day one that your company sees people, not just output. In 2025, that’s a baseline for healthy virtual team culture.
Fun activities have their place, but real trust forms when people feel safe sharing challenges, whether work-related or personal. It’s not about fixing problems. It’s about being there for each other. That kind of authenticity changes how teams operate.
Chief Executive Officer,
DFW Turf Solutions
📍Remote Storytelling Sessions. Add reflection to your team building exercises for remote teams. Host storytelling sessions where team members share memorable work-related experiences or achievements. This creates space for vulnerability and helps people connect beyond task management, especially useful across cultures or first languages.
Trust wasn’t built through bonding. It came from shared accountability and emotional honesty. We saw the biggest shift when we started structured ‘Real Debriefs,’ where people shared not just wins, but failures, challenges, and even personal frustrations.
📍Virtual Coffee Breaks or Happy Hours. Want to mimic physical teams and recreate the office experience? It is the simplest way to brighten a remote working day and spend time together informally. Schedule regular informal video coffee breaks where even members of separate remote teams can connect, chat, and unwind in a relaxed setting. You can utilize some randomizers like Donut. It automatically distributes teammates into pairs.
These lightweight syncs are a proven tactic for leaders wondering how to manage remote teams without micromanagement. Cross-team pairing reduces silos, surfaces blockers early, and humanizes async collaboration.
Want to go further? Order local food delivery for each of your team members simultaneously and have a virtual lunch together. It’s a simple way to create shared experience, especially in globally distributed teams.
📍”Two Truths and a Lie”. This is a popular and quick game to learn interesting facts about each other. So it is possible to integrate it into some team meetings.
During onboarding or project kickoffs, this game is easy, fast, and always sparks a laugh.
📍Online Karaoke Night. Some consider it to be one of the most fun remote team-building activities. Sing your hearts out during a virtual karaoke night and enjoy some lighthearted entertainment. It works best in small groups or regional squads, where people already share some social comfort.
📍Virtual Paint and Sip. Arrange a virtual paint and sip event where team members follow an art instructor's guidance and discuss each other’s paintings. It's a hit for milestone celebrations, especially with a diverse talent pool where visual creativity builds shared memory.
📍Team Building Platforms. Explore online hubs like Teambuilding.com, Fundoo Friday, and The Offsite Co, offering you a wide range of team building activities for remote employees. You can also find AI-based virtual team building exercises tailored to mood, team size, or async preferences.
📍Virtual Excursions. What about inviting your colleagues to make a virtual trip to your place or other remote working locations, or showing them the fav places of your hometown? It's an effective way to shape virtual workplace culture, especially with globally distributed teams.
📍Photo Challenge. Encourage team members to share one of the last captions in their Google Photo, iCloud, or where they usually keep their photo. Ask about the reasons for their choice. It works well asynchronously and adds a human touch to your team chat without adding meeting time.
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Motivators
📍Remote Wellness Challenges. We’ve seen step challenges, hydration trackers, and even casual morning stretch sessions spark surprising camaraderie, especially in fully remote teams where wellness often slips off the radar. These low-lift efforts go beyond fitness; they open up small moments of accountability and shared wins that quietly strengthen the team dynamic.
📍Online Employee Awards. Recognize accomplishments through virtual award ceremonies. The algorithm is simple: you keep the intrigue as before Oscar Night, and your team has food for discussion as after Oscar Night. Gamified shout-outs, live polls, or peer-nominated badges add energy to monthly check-ins and show appreciation at scale.
📍Public Planning. When you announce your goal to the team or only to your manager, it is not so easy to wriggle out of it. Plus, you get a more clear aim visualization, believe us. It’s still a useful nudge for self-managed teams. Add it to your list of low-effort, high-impact remote team building ideas.
We ran a session called “Open Fist”, a one-minute safe space where anyone could vent or speak freely. It revealed blind spots we didn’t know existed and led to real change. Trust deepened once people felt heard, not just managed.
Co-Founder & Director,
Click Intelligence
Competitions
📍Online Trivia Competitions. Trivia works best when it's personal. Instead of pulling random questions off the internet, we’ve seen better engagement when the rounds include inside jokes, product history, or tech stack trivia specific to the team. Whether it's “Who deployed that Friday hotfix in 2022?” or “Which API broke the most last quarter?”, it gets laughs and genuine connection. This kind of trivia becomes a casual storytelling tool, perfect for team building for remote teams without forcing small talk.
📍Online Gaming Tournaments. Host gaming tournaments using co-op or team-based games like Among Us, or Fall Guys. The key is to treat it like a recurring event, not a one-off. Monthly leaderboards or mini trophies add continuity. In some engineering teams, these sessions can become the cultural glue between geographically distant offices.
📍Virtual Escape Rooms. Solve puzzles and riddles together within a time limit to “escape” the virtual room. Some providers now offer packages tailored to distributed tech teams. It’s a quick way to surface collaboration styles, creative thinking, and delegation skills. For teams that rarely work synchronously, it’s one of the most effective virtual team building activities out there.
📍Virtual Scavenger Hunts. These work best when the prompts go beyond “find a red object.” Try things like “something you regret buying” or “an item you’ve carried from job to job.” It shifts the focus from speed to storytelling. Whether you run it live or async, it gives quieter team members a way to participate meaningfully. There is no spotlight, just small, surprising reveals that make colleagues feel more real to each other.s
Hobby Days
📍Show-and-Tell Sessions. These work well in smaller groups, especially when integrated into an existing sync (e.g. using the last 10 minutes of a retro to spotlight someone’s hobby). Whether it’s woodworking, music production, or brewing niche coffee, the format gives teammates a reason to talk about something they love, outside of tasks. It builds curiosity and cross-team connection without feeling forced or off-topic.
📍Virtual Book Club. Create a space where tech enthusiasts can read and discuss books related to their industry and other preferred literature. Don’t limit this idea to the reading club. You can organize a speaking language club for foreign language learners or bike fun club. Pay attention to what is closer to your team.
Life-Changers
📍Remote Charity Events. Team volunteering hits differently when it's based on shared values. Start by running a quick poll on what causes matter most (e.g. animal shelters, refugee aid, digital literacy programs), and let the team vote on where to contribute. Some companies rotate causes quarterly or give each region a turn to nominate. Matching donations or organizing time-based campaigns (like “1 hour of code for a cause”) adds focus without turning it into a branding exercise.
📍Urgent Support. Beyond external causes, internal support goes further. Whether it's helping with relocation, mental health stipends, or emergency funds, having a system in place makes a real difference. Some remote teams we’ve worked with offer ad-hoc microgrants or create a transparent help channel where teammates can request or offer short-term support. A few also share vetted side-income platforms for data work or freelance gigs that don’t interfere with their core role.
📍Eco-aware Flesh-mobs. If you want to get your team moving around a shared goal, try something like “plant and post,” where everyone documents a small eco-action in their city. It could be collecting street litter, switching to refill stations, or hosting a local swap event. These aren’t big programs, but they build culture across regions and turn climate goals into small, shareable actions. Create a shared photo thread or Notion page for people to log their impact.
What Results May I Expect?
When team building is intentional and consistent, here’s what you’ll likely see:
Smoother day-to-day collaboration, with fewer blockers and delays
More direct, honest communication across functions and time zones
Teammates who actually support each other — not just on paper, but in action
Lower turnover, especially among high performers who feel seen and trusted
A culture that scales with you, instead of falling apart when new people join
As a result, you create the kind of team that others want to be part of. And when that happens, hiring gets easier, onboarding gets faster, and your delivery gets sharper.
FAQ
How can team building improve remote employee engagement?
It makes people feel like part of a team, not just names in a project tracker. When someone has a space to speak up, share a laugh, or feel seen for who they are, they’re more likely to stay involved, contribute openly, and care about the outcome.
How often should you host remote team building events?
For most teams, once or twice a month is enough to keep momentum without burning people out. That said, small weekly habits often do more to build trust than any one-off event.
What tools can help organize virtual team building for remote workers?
The best tools are the ones your team already uses. Slack and Zoom cover most needs. For structure, Donut is great for casual intros, Gatheround adds depth, and Trello or Notion work well for async challenges. Just keep it simple and consistent.
Kateryna joined the IT industry 3 years ago. Reviewing B2B software and related frameworks, she concluded that the best-in-class programs need well-built teams and started to write about tech teams scaling. Her natural habit to improve texts and search for alternative visions comes from working at the publishing house in early youth.
