The coronavirus has made it even tougher to build a team. But, don’t despair. Try some of these ideas to build your team safely now.

One of the elements of an exceptional organization is that it is made up of great teams. However, great teams don’t just happen. In the Tour de France, the NBA, the US Army, the corporate world, and your organization, teams required an enormous amount of work to build and maintain them. As you know, there are five critical elements that helped forge great teams:

• A goal

• A roadmap of how to get there

• A scoreboard that tracks the progress

• A culture that provides the guardrails for the team to operate between.

• Trust in the team that developed through shared experiences and hardships

So how do you build the trust through shared experiences and hardships? The coronavirus is definitely a shared hardship, but are you, as a leader, using it to build or break down your team? Research has shown that team building activities can positively enhance team performance. The research also says that there are five team building activities that produce the best results:

• Physical Activities

• Field Trips

• Professional development activities

• Shared Meals

• Volunteering

The physical distance of working remotely can rapidly evolve into emotional distance and even isolation. I’m not an epidemiologist, but unfortunately it feels like the pandemic will be with us until mid to late 2021. So, remote work is here for the long haul. If your employees feel isolated, they won’t be comfortable working as part of the team and your organization will not perform at the highest level. It takes time and energy to create a team environment where remote workers can excel.

Try one, or all, of these safer team building events to create the environment where your remote workers can thrive:

• The Virtual Step Challenge — your team tries to get the most steps on your phone or watch over a 5 day period. Post your results each day in the group text.

• Fantasy sports — it really isn’t important if your team likes football, cycling, or baseball. The opportunity to see how members of your group think about problems, develop strategies, and interact with each other are the important goals of having the team participate in a fantasy sports league.

• Virtual professional development — bring in a guest speaker for 90 minutes (Contact us for a webinar).

• Shared meals — host a virtual happy hour at 4:00 PM on a Friday. It gives your team a chance to end work early and socialize. Plus you don’t have to watch everyone try to eat.

• Picture sharing — have everyone bring one picture to the next meeting and share the importance of it with the group. This helps to build the connections in the team.

• Theme dress up days — if everyone is working remotely, have everyone wear black or something with the corporate logo one day. Halloween is right around the corner, too.

• Virtual trivia — there are several companies out there that will provide trivia games for your team to do as a one-off or as a weekly event. Similar to fantasy sports, the opportunity to see how members of your group think about problems, develop strategies, and interact with each other are the important goals of playing virtual trivia.

• Virtual escape room — bring the team together by solving a virtual escape room problem.

• Teach a class — have each team member teach a class on something that they are great at to the team. It can be a work topic or a personal one. Thanks Chris Cline for suggesting this idea!

• Picnic — before the winter sets in, have the team rally outside for a socially-distanced picnic.

• Socially distanced or masked hike — use a socially distanced hike as a way to bring the team together outside the workplace.

Forging a great team takes hard work and effort. Go on the offense to use innovative ways to build your team remotely or safely during the remainder of 2020 and on into 2021.