15 Trust Building Activities for Work in 2023

Without trust in your team, your business will struggle to be successful. Trust in teams is the vital force that helps people understand how everyone in the team is impacted by their judgments, actions, and expectations of others.

Lack of trust between the team members or with the team leader leads to high conflicts, evidence in low team productivity and relational commitment. While one of the most difficult things in building a team is fostering trust, remote working has not made it any better because of its unique characteristics:

• More risk of conflict from seemingly small overlooked elements and delayed responses.
• Less social interaction that lenders fewer opportunities for social control.
• Poor understanding of context.
• Higher risk to communication ambiguity.

This leaves an increased need but a more vital question of how you can build trust in your virtual team. Fortunately, there are lots of fun team-building activities that you can initiate in your remote team via Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, or any team communication platform to connect and build trust.

This guide outlines:

• Virtual trust-building activities for remote teams
• Trust-building activities for virtual teams
• Team-trust building activities for adults
• Team-building trust activities
• Bonding team games for remote workers
• Virtual team bonding activities

15 Activities to Build Trust with your Remote Colleagues

Virtual Team Building

Virtual team building activities bring remote teams together to achieve deeper bonds. As team members engage in fun and engaging team-building activities, they get to show off their creative and personal abilities that deepen their understanding of each other.

Besides, as the team is challenged to work together to accomplish some goal in the online team activities, they learn to rely on each other to accomplish work tasks.

Similar to office team building, virtual team trust-building activities should be carefully designed to include strategies, games, and activities that enhance more interaction for the remote team.

Read more about virtual team-building activities.

Virtual Coworking Hours

Virtual work is highly independent. A team member is often expected to complete a task with minimal interaction with the other team members or their team lead. Frequent coworking meetups are necessary to eliminate the isolation in virtual work.

Spending time with your team is a great way to build lasting bonds. Time together often leads to a better understanding of the other team members, but it also reminds them of the value of the work and their significance in the organization. Coworking hours should be short, frequent, and incorporate socialization at the beginning or end of the meeting.

Virtual Games

Virtual games can be incorporated as part of your virtual team building, but they can also be played in everyday virtual team meetings. Virtual team-building games are a fantastic idea to build trust in a team. The good thing is there are numerous psychological trust exercises, games, and activities that will help your team bond. From Pictionary, Virtual Happy Hour, Puzzles, Remote Talent Shows, Werewolf to Virtual Bingo, you can’t run out of fun games to play.

Here’s our list of favorite virtual games to play in your virtual meetings and retreats.

Remote Book Club

Reading is one of the best ways to build relationships with remote teams while learning. It promotes understanding team members and how they see the world. You want to choose a fun fiction or professional book and have your team read it over the next month.

Even better, let each team member suggest the book of the month, and you all read it. By sharing their favorite books, your colleagues will have something new to bond about. Then have a scheduled virtual time discussing the book, say over lunchtime.

Virtual Cook Party

Nothing bonds people like food. If eating together keeps the bond strong and makes people feel connected, imagine what making the food with your team would do for them. But lack of physical meetings doesn’t have to stop you from hosting a cooking party.

Online cooking experiences enable your virtual team to host interactive cooking classes. You can opt to have the ingredients sent to all participants and a trained chef guiding your team through the process. Once the cooking is over, just pour a glass of wine and enjoy the scrumptious meal with everyone.

Virtual Murder Mystery Party

Online Murder Mystery game is specifically designed to boost your remote team’s morale and encourage collaboration, which will lead to them developing trust with each other. Your remote team will have to race against the clock together to try to solve the mystery behind the murder.

Examining clues and reviewing case files will strengthen team communication and relationships. This is also a fun and exciting virtual team bonding activity you want to try.

Browse a variety of Virtual Murder Mystery games for your virtual team.

Bring Your Pet to Work Day

Your remote team doesn’t have to solve a problem for them to bond. A simple activity like showing off their furry friends and talking about them, sharing photos, anecdotes, and stories will do wonders. This can not only be a mood booster for all but can spark a sense of connection beyond the professional view. Besides, it’s a great time to finally put faces to all the meows and woofs you’ve heard in the background. If any of your colleagues isn’t a pet person, invite them to share a passion or hobby.

Two Truths, One Lie

How this game brings people together is mind-blowing. Plus, it’s very easy. To get started on this one, one team member will tell three statements about themselves. The other team members will then take turns to tell which two statements are true and which is a lie. While telling the difference between a truth and a lie is surprisingly difficult, this game will allow the team to learn much about the others.

Your team will leave with a better understanding of their peers, along with their fun facts and entertaining stories they may hardly tell in an everyday work conversation. Play this game out loud in a video call, or simply post these statements in a chat or Slack thread and ask players to take their vote.

Something in Common

Something in Common is a great virtual trust-building activity for your remote team. It helps the team realize how much alike they are with others. One of our needs as humans is to feel alike and accepted. Finding those people who have something common will find a basis for your team to connect. You want to have your team members paired or in small groups where they’ll find 3-5 things they have in common. They’ll then share with the rest the discoveries they found.

Virtual Who Scavenger Hunt

The first thing before you can build any bonds is getting your teammates acquainted with each other. It helps that they know other members or teams in the organization. The Who Scavenger Hunt combines prompts such as, “who works with Mark, knows about IOS updates, and was in a meeting about list building?” Consider pairing other non-work-related prompts, such as “who’s dog is named Fluffy Bird?”

Check Virtual Scavenger games you can experience with your team.

Lunch and Learn

Besides the more structured team trust-building activities, your team would greatly benefit from an easy and relaxed time they enjoyed during office lunch hours. Consider a monthly team lunch (or when your team prefers). Better yet, treat them to an ordered meal and just connect over the video, eat and chat—no other agendas. By the end of it, people will feel more close-knit.

Virtual Escape Room

Virtual Escape Room is a popular online trust-building activity. It includes both problem solving, socialization, and teamwork elements, which makes it fun and interactive.

This game will not only foster more creative-solving, collaboration, and brainstorming, but in the process, it requires your team to develop trust with each other. Otherwise, there’s no way your team will together solve mind-boggling challenges and uncover the hidden clues.

Learn how you can use Escape Room to build trust for your virtual team.

The One-Question Icebreaker

Icebreaker questions make it easy to know your team members, something that as a manager you should be striving towards to earn trust from your virtual team. Consider asking non-work-related questions which show you care for your employees as humans, not just as coworkers. Most often, coworkers are more likely to bond with others who show interest in their lives.

One simple trust-building idea to start or end your team building virtually is to add the one-question icebreaker. This is the easiest way to get the team members to learn about each other and connecting. Some professional icebreaker questions to warm up a meeting can be:

• “What’s your favorite TV show?”
• “What doesn’t the team know about you?”
• “What’s your dream destination?”
• “What book, movie, or TV show best describes your life?”

To make it even more interesting, have your colleagues bring the items to show and tell. Check more icebreaker questions.

Virtual Trivia

Besides the fun your team will have in these competitive question-based challenges, trivia engages your team to nurture teamwork. Yet, setting up a trivia challenge is simple. All you need is to prepare and create the quiz with the help of tools such as Kahoot, then share the link with the team.

The players can then engage in breakout rooms, where they share their answers privately. This brings them together and connects them to build bonds that last beyond the fun.

Discover highly creative Trivia challenges.

Share About Themselves

People love to talk about themselves. But now without face-to-face interaction, there isn’t much environment for that. Giving people a chance to talk more about themselves on a virtual call will do wonders. In fact, with the right questions, your team members will share vulnerable aspects of themselves and as proven, there is no better way to build trust than this.

Bonus: Effective Communication

Without effective communication in a virtual team, even the best team trust-building activities will not effectively achieve and maintain trust in a team.

Often, virtual team members are left without clear communication of their responsibilities and timelines. Other times, they’re not constantly updated about the progress of the project or even given the bigger picture of how their work contributes to the overall project or organization. An effective inclusive environment and frequent communication are the best tips for earning trust when working from home.

While there is a myriad of communication tools, team managers fail to use them to ensure communication effectiveness in an organization. You need a knack of what, when, and how to use these tools to create a virtual team environment that fosters trust.

Final Thoughts

Numerous researches have demonstrated the direct relationship between trust and team performance. This is not different for virtual team effectiveness, which, unlike face-to-face teams, doesn’t happen on its own. To foster this trust, we’ve outlined some of our best trust-building activities for virtual teams. With that, you have the opportunity to improve your teams’ effectiveness.

FAQs