30 Creative Virtual Team Building Questions to Build Trust at Work
Ah, the beloved yet belittled topic of workplace icebreakers.
Whether you love or hate these ‘getting-to-know-you’ situations, team building questions are vital in building trust at work and can boost employee engagement.
However, to avoid those awkward silences and ensure your team isn’t scared or bored, team leaders need to take a little care when creating team-building exercises and fielding their team building questions.
This is especially true for virtual team building. Without the helpful social lubricant of face-to-face interactions, virtual workplaces may not seemingly be the ideal context to open up and get personal.
However, as a team leader, there are ways you can combat this – let’s take a look at why team-building is essential and explore some options for virtual team building questions that can build trust at work.
Funny Icebreaker questions – nobody wants to be bored
While those questions that create empathy and shared understanding are important, it’s vital for engagement to ask team building questions that can inspire something a little out of the ordinary.
The same goes for virtual icebreakers for remote teams as for regular in-person team bonding sessions – it’s essential to inject some creative fun into proceedings.
Check out these examples of fun icebreaker questions:
- Who are your three dream dinner guests?
- The zombie apocalypse is coming, and you’re assembling a team of four. Who’s on your team and why?
- What’s your desktop image, and why?
- What was your first thought when you woke up this morning?
- Money-no-object, what’s your dream upcoming weekend?
- Other than the standards, come up with a new superpower you’d like to have – how would you use it?
- When was the last time you laughed out loud/cried at something?
- What’s your most embarrassing moment?
- Who was your childhood crush?
- In detail, what’s your favourite sandwich?
- If you were stuck on a deserted island, how long do you think you’d last?
- What appliances would your dream house have?
- Would you rather be the funniest or smartest person in the room?
- What’s the most embarrassing fashion trend you’ve ever followed?
- Who is your worst enemy?
These questions are a bit left-field and may surprise your coworkers.
Some of these questions are impersonal, offering employees a chance to explore their creative side without oversharing. Others are the opposite, allowing for an opportunity for employees to share something vulnerable about their personal lives. As a result, they often yield interesting responses and provide other jumping-off points and avenues of explorative discussion.
You know your team, so exercise some skill in selecting your slightly more weird, out-there team bonding questions.
Tried-and-tested team building questions
We’ve discussed acknowledging the virtual workplace and giving intriguing interrogatives to get those creative juices flowing.
However, with your team building questions, some workers like to fall back and talk about the staples: food, music, movies, travel, and sports.
Whenever you conduct your team bonding sessions, sprinkle in a few of these tried and tested team building questions:
- What is your favourite food?
- What is the most recent movie you’ve watched, and would you recommend it?
- What is the best book you’ve ever read?
- What are you currently watching on Netflix?
- What is your dream holiday destination?
- What has been your favourite travel experience so far?
- What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?
- What’s your go-to music at a party? What is your musical guilty pleasure?
- Do you support any sports teams?
- What would your dream job be?
They work for a reason – most people are comfortable sharing and talking about their food, movies, books, and sports interests.
As a team leader, you can open this up to discuss other hobbies and interests that you know your team has. It’s safe ground and serves as a great way to find commonality between team members, thus building trust.
Think outside the box
At MeetingTeams, we’re the experts at finding solutions to your team building needs. When it comes to building trust, we know that asking team-building icebreaker questions are a mainstay for team leaders – and rightly so.
However, there are other alternatives for virtual team building sessions that feature questions creatively, allowing your teams to engage in fun problem-solving activities in the virtual office space.
At MeetingTeams, our specialists have designed engaging escape room activities for your teams. Teams work together to solve problems and riddles that allow them to ‘escape’ from virtual rooms using their personal skills.
A fun ice-breaking activity, these escape rooms also help develop core team-building skills, encourage communication, and allow for exploration within a fun setting – building that all-important trust.
While questions should form a part of any team building activity, our virtual escape rooms allow employees to get to know each other through an active and engaging task, and our clients say this creates lasting memories.
Fully-customisable events at MeetingTeams
Besides the virtual escape rooms, we also provide treasure hunts and the ever-popular Amazing Race days. All three virtual event types help you organise team-building events that build trust while entertaining.
These team-building events serve as extensions to the standard team building questions we have talked about, and those still serve as fundamental elements to our icebreaking efforts within these events.
However, we believe that our engaging activities work to allow colleagues to communicate in more meaningful ways to build trust.
To find out more about how we can help your teams, reach out start a conversation today.
Why is team building important?
Team cohesiveness is essential in the modern workplace. Without teamwork, a team is nothing more than a group of individuals, each person pursuing their objectives and goals without regard for the overall aims of the team.
A successful team is one where each team member knows their role, the role of their colleagues, and can trust their manager to give clear and concise instructions. This team coordinates their efforts, relies on each other, and shares responsibility for team objectives.
Sound good? Well, this kind of work environment doesn’t just spontaneously materialise. Active team building is required.
It takes time and effort to build a fantastic team, to build the trust that binds them together. As a leader, you are responsible for actively developing this atmosphere and forging personal connections between coworkers.
A tried and tested method for developing these connections is the much-maligned team building session, complete with team building questions. Torturous if not executed skillfully, yet memorable for all the right reasons if done well.
And, more importantly for your business, well-executed team building questions will be productive in building that trust that will benefit the team in the long run.
With virtual workplaces here to stay, leaders face the added challenge of navigating the team building minefield in a virtual setting. Let’s examine a few pointers for virtual team bonding questions.
Address the nature of the virtual workplace
Address the elephant in the Zoom meeting head-on and acknowledge that the virtual workplace may be a new concept for many workers.
While some workers will have been working remotely for a while, some may be embracing a hybrid or flexible model, and some will be utterly new to this working environment.
Whatever their experience, remote workers identify a lack of social interaction as their biggest challenge working from home. It’s your job to acknowledge this and help build rapport between workers in other ways.
Consider virtual icebreakers in meetings that ask these kinds of team building questions:
- Can you give us a tour of your workspace?
- What do you miss about working in the office?
- What are the benefits of working from home? What do you find challenging?
- How do you take breaks when working at home?
- Do you have any pets for company at work? Cat person or dog person
- How do you decorate your workspace at home?
- What brings you joy during your workday?
- Are you a morning person or a night person?
- What is your usual work attire?
- Do you try and get some exercise during the workday?
The list here is not exhaustive – you should tailor team building questions to what you know about your team.
The point is to ask questions that shine a light on how workers manage their virtual work environment. By sharing this, colleagues naturally empathise with their respective situations. This humanisation is vital to building trust in a remote team.
Funny Icebreaker questions – nobody wants to be bored
While those questions that create empathy and shared understanding are important, it’s vital for engagement to ask team building questions that can inspire something a little out of the ordinary.
The same goes for virtual icebreakers for remote teams as for regular in-person team bonding sessions – it’s essential to inject some creative fun into proceedings.
Check out these examples of fun icebreaker questions:
- Who are your three dream dinner guests?
- The zombie apocalypse is coming, and you’re assembling a team of four. Who’s on your team and why?
- What’s your desktop image, and why?
- What was your first thought when you woke up this morning?
- Money-no-object, what’s your dream upcoming weekend?
- Other than the standards, come up with a new superpower you’d like to have – how would you use it?
- When was the last time you laughed out loud/cried at something?
- What’s your most embarrassing moment?
- Who was your childhood crush?
- In detail, what’s your favourite sandwich?
- If you were stuck on a deserted island, how long do you think you’d last?
- What appliances would your dream house have?
- Would you rather be the funniest or smartest person in the room?
- What’s the most embarrassing fashion trend you’ve ever followed?
- Who is your worst enemy?
These questions are a bit left-field and may surprise your coworkers.
Some of these questions are impersonal, offering employees a chance to explore their creative side without oversharing. Others are the opposite, allowing for an opportunity for employees to share something vulnerable about their personal lives. As a result, they often yield interesting responses and provide other jumping-off points and avenues of explorative discussion.
You know your team, so exercise some skill in selecting your slightly more weird, out-there team bonding questions.
Tried-and-tested team building questions
We’ve discussed acknowledging the virtual workplace and giving intriguing interrogatives to get those creative juices flowing.
However, with your team building questions, some workers like to fall back and talk about the staples: food, music, movies, travel, and sports.
Whenever you conduct your team bonding sessions, sprinkle in a few of these tried and tested team building questions:
- What is your favourite food?
- What is the most recent movie you’ve watched, and would you recommend it?
- What is the best book you’ve ever read?
- What are you currently watching on Netflix?
- What is your dream holiday destination?
- What has been your favourite travel experience so far?
- What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?
- What’s your go-to music at a party? What is your musical guilty pleasure?
- Do you support any sports teams?
- What would your dream job be?
They work for a reason – most people are comfortable sharing and talking about their food, movies, books, and sports interests.
As a team leader, you can open this up to discuss other hobbies and interests that you know your team has. It’s safe ground and serves as a great way to find commonality between team members, thus building trust.
Think outside the box
At MeetingTeams, we’re the experts at finding solutions to your team building needs. When it comes to building trust, we know that asking team-building icebreaker questions are a mainstay for team leaders – and rightly so.
However, there are other alternatives for virtual team building sessions that feature questions creatively, allowing your teams to engage in fun problem-solving activities in the virtual office space.
At MeetingTeams, our specialists have designed engaging escape room activities for your teams. Teams work together to solve problems and riddles that allow them to ‘escape’ from virtual rooms using their personal skills.
A fun ice-breaking activity, these escape rooms also help develop core team-building skills, encourage communication, and allow for exploration within a fun setting – building that all-important trust.
While questions should form a part of any team building activity, our virtual escape rooms allow employees to get to know each other through an active and engaging task, and our clients say this creates lasting memories.
Fully-customisable events at MeetingTeams
Besides the virtual escape rooms, we also provide treasure hunts and the ever-popular Amazing Race days. All three virtual event types help you organise team-building events that build trust while entertaining.
These team-building events serve as extensions to the standard team building questions we have talked about, and those still serve as fundamental elements to our icebreaking efforts within these events.
However, we believe that our engaging activities work to allow colleagues to communicate in more meaningful ways to build trust.
To find out more about how we can help your teams, reach out start a conversation today.
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