Organise Virtual Christmas Games for Your Company
It’s almost that time of the year where companies start celebrating the holiday season. Christmas is an exciting time, and you’ll usually find them joining events before enjoying some time off. However, COVID-19 has made it inconvenient for people to physically meet at enclosed locations, which puts a damper on employee morale and spirit.
That’s where corporate team building in Singapore comes in. To maintain that bond between colleagues and retain communication, you can engage in virtual activities. We have a host of online games for the festive season your employees can engage in from the comfort of their homes!
The joy of gathering during the festive season
There’s something special about Christmas in Singapore, and COVID-19 almost ruined it for many families and employees in the country. However, we fought to maintain that festive spirit, even if it meant we couldn’t gather in public spaces anymore. We found inventive ways to stay in touch and share the joy, such as sending gifts via delivery or using technology to our advantage.
Still, not being able to see or embrace each other in gatherings has taken its toll on many of us. There was a special kind of comfort in greeting everyone with smiles and talking the night away that filled our hearts with warmth and let our worries fall away.
Recreating the same atmosphere virtually
Just because there are restrictions, it doesn’t mean we can’t recreate the same warmth in our hearts. You can engage with a team building company in Singapore for the festive season to bring back that joy and frivolity. There are plenty of activities you can engage in to make it feel like an office party again.
For instance, you can send food parcels when you arrange a virtual dinner and dance for your employees in Singapore. You can also plan games for them to play from the comfort of their home, such as a Christmas-themed Amazing Race. To create more excitement, you can even set up a lucky draw with attractive cash prizes!
What type of virtual Christmas games does Making Teams offer?
Our team building company in Singapore has several virtual Christmas games for your employees to enjoy. They will make their remote offices feel festive, and you can have members of their family join if they like. Here are a few activities we offer:
- Xmas Scavenger Hunt: After forming teams, employees will have limited time to find specific objects in their homes. You’ll need to select from the generic items on the list so that everyone can join, such as something red or round.
- Xmas Music Challenge: Your teams will listen to extracts from songs from popular music television shows to see if they can identify them.
- Xmas Sales Pitch: Every employee will have the opportunity to pitch a crazy idea or product to the team with only one minute to promote it. The objective is to make it as hilarious as possible.
- Xmas Zoom Picture: Contestants will receive a zoomed-in portion of an image while guessing what it could possibly be.
- Xmas Millionaires: A combination of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Wheel of Fortune, participants will press a virtual buzzer to answer questions to see who can accumulate the most points.
Build a strong bond with your employees
When it’s been a long stressful year with everyone working remotely from home, it’s a good idea to take some time off with corporate team building activities in Singapore. These virtual Christmas games are ideal for strengthening the bonds between your employees who may feel like they’ve lost touch with one another due to the default working from home arrangement.
Moreover, engaging in some fun is also a good way for employees to get away from work and enjoy themselves. This helps to uplift spirits and can do wonders to strengthen communication and trust among your team members.
Organise a fun Christmas party with Singapore Team Building’s games
Don’t let the pandemic put a damper on your team’s Christmas spirit! With these exciting virtual games, your team can still enjoy the holidays and soak in the festive spirit. Feel free to contact us if you want to know more about the activities we offer in Singapore.
Customised Virtual Games: Why Are They Better?
In a time when remote work has become the norm, it can be challenging to encourage your staff to remain motivated and productive. Communication between teammates drops, especially when each member is working independently at home.
Online virtual team building is an activity you can introduce that will help boost morale and promote collaboration between colleagues. For example, you can send them on a Treasure Hunt, or they can solve a Murder Mystery. They’ll have so much fun; you’ll see how eager they are to get back to work the next day!
Why settle for standard cookie-cutter virtual team building games, though? Up the ante and customise them to make them more exciting and engaging for your team!
What are customised virtual games?
Here at Making Teams, we have two fully customisable virtual games — Amazing Race and Escape Room. While they both provide loads of excitement and a sense of adventure, you can incorporate any business elements you want them to focus on. For example, the theme can be centred around cybersecurity or make the employees aware of the consequences of fake news in social media.
The benefits of these customised online team building games are that they increase participation while also showcasing your company’s values. They can even be used as a training tool to impart valuable skills or motivate employees to concentrate on company goals.
How can they be customised for better team-building?
There are many ways in which corporate team-building games like our virtual Escape Room and Amazing Race can be customised to suit your organisation. From visual elements like logos and branding to custom challenges related to a particular industry or topic, our team endeavours to make your virtual game experience as unique as possible.
Customised virtual Escape Room
The premise of the virtual Escape Room remains the same as real-life games. Members are trapped in a virtual environment with only a few clues as to how they can exit the room. Where the customised online version differs is the main theme and objects that relate to your core business.
For instance, we designed a pirate-themed online escape room for a shipping company where members were virtually trapped inside a ship cabin. Escaping involved a fun series of objectives such as sending a distress call to Navy seals and decoding Morse code messages.
Customised virtual Amazing Race
The same energy goes into making customised Amazing Race games for your team. We can use locations of your corporate buildings, whether local or global, as destination points. You can also have the CEO or directors make special videos that relay the mission briefings or puzzles that reflect your team or organisation.
Take our collaboration with Great Eastern Life, an insurance company, as an example. We added custom challenges based on financial and insurance calculations, such as a currency conversion game set in Rome, a monopoly game in London, and a cryptocurrency game in San Francisco!
Why should you choose to customise virtual games?
Since customised online virtual team building games are tailored to fit your business, there’s a stronger sense of belonging and increased productivity when you add elements from your work into these games. It encourages them to use similar skills when working remotely, such as better communication and problem-solving.
If anything, it takes away the loneliness of working alone from home and hardly seeing colleagues while toiling away at mundane tasks every day. Online team-building games can help lift their spirits and relieve stress.
Organise fun team building games with Making Teams
If you’re keen to improve team morale and encourage members to work together, check our virtual team-building activities for more ideas. When you see how well they communicate and work towards the same goals afterwards, you’ll be thankful that you embarked on this journey with them. If you have any questions about our corporate bonding activities or how you can customise them for your business, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Virtual Team Building: Annual Dinner & Dance 2.0
Before COVID-19 upended the world as we know it in 2020, many companies were engaging in team-building exercises as a way to improve workplace relationships, performance, and productivity. Annual year-end corporate Dinner & Dances were fun events employees looked forward to, a time to celebrate successful projects, let loose and welcome in the new year. However, when the pandemic forced businesses to shut their doors and enforce lockdowns, many of such activities could no longer take place.
While this may still be the case, there are solutions that can liven up the year-end atmosphere and recreate some of the fun dinner and dance events used to bring. With virtual team building games, we help you maintain that bond between co-workers, even though they don’t work in the same space anymore.
Why are corporate events necessary?
When the pandemic arose, many companies turned their focus to digital transformation and new processes to ensure that work continued remotely. During this time of change, colleagues no longer had the opportunity to sit together in a physical space and address critical business matters. It also became more challenging to monitor progress.
With corporate team building in Singapore falling by the wayside, there’s a struggle to maintain interpersonal skills that took years to cultivate. The foundation of trust that relied on workspace activities and innovative collaboration became harder to achieve.
That doesn’t mean you can’t approach a team building company in Singapore for assistance. It still remains an impactful way to unite your workforce and keep them focused on corporate goals.
How does a connected worker make for a better worker?
When you have employees that remain connected by a strong bond, they feel better motivated to handle challenging tasks ahead. You’ll see them work together as they brainstorm ideas, while any distance between them doesn’t foster alienation or conflict.
It can be challenging to keep workers closely connected and retain that high quality and productivity that’s facilitated in a physical workplace. Virtual team building is the solution to this problem, encouraging creativity among them and spurring them on towards improved communication between them.
Your most significant danger is when workers enjoy working alone and shut themselves off from the rest of the team. They sometimes forget that the competition is out there in the market and not between the workforce. While it can be sometimes healthy for them to compete, it can also lead to estrangement and the building of barriers.
Virtual or hybrid dinner and dance parties
One method that works for corporate team building in Singapore is the virtual dinner and dance party. You can engage with a company to arrange party packages delivered to their homes and streamed music as part of the online experience. Your team will feel like they’re attending a party together, no matter how far apart they really are.
To make it work, you engage with a team building company in Singapore like ours to make magic happen. You can decide on the theme of dinner and dance, whether Hollywood glam or a murder-detective, and how the dinner should be organised. It doesn’t matter where they’re located, as everything will be done online and they can attend from the safety of their homes.
Organise fun party games with Making Teams’ games
Making Teams has plenty of virtual party team building games you can engage in to make your members feel closer together. Popular ones are Halloween-themed races or holiday packages. Workers can take part in their own Amazing Race, or they can embark on a fantastic Treasure Hunt.
Since the digital space is so versatile, we’re also open to any virtual team building suggestions. We’ll gladly add them to our game product category page if there’s enough demand for the party category.
So, make sure you reach out to us to organise your corporate team building events in Singapore. Not only will everything run smoothly, but we’ll make sure to cater to your team’s needs for the magical day or evening. It will show them just how much you value them as employees and people contributing towards your company’s vision.
Communication Skills: Team Building Murder Mystery Game
The last few years have seen an upsurge in companies sending their employees to work remotely from home. While it may have been necessary due to the pandemic, there has been a rise in technology and software to assist in making the change more successful.
One of the many issues that has arisen is the drop in communication, where many team members have to deal with miscommunication or feel distant and disengaged from their workplace. They sometimes misunderstand each other, which affects the work and remaining focused on the goals. Fortunately, there’s a way you can help them bridge that gap in the form of a murder mystery team building game.
What is a murder mystery game?
In essence, a murder mystery game is where teams work together to solve a homicide crime. Everyone has a role, but one of them is the actual murderer. There are several clues they’ll have to solve to uncover which one of them it is, which is why communication is key.
Usually, when played face-to-face, people meet at a physical location with a group of up to eight. There is also a limit to the number of people who can play, as there are a limited number of characters. When you play the murder mystery game online, you don’t have this limit. We have a maximum group size of 1000 players, with this group broken up into smaller groups of up to 10 team members since there’s greater capacity for more members.
How does it work virtually?
The murder mystery online version is slightly different to the in-person team-building approach. You’ll need to connect everyone to a communication platform, such as Zoom, Skype or Microsoft Teams. As the host, you’ll send the invite to everyone for the meeting, ensuring that they’re all available for the scheduled time.
Once everyone has characters assigned, the host explains how the murder mystery team building game will work online. Over three distinct rounds, your team will assume the personalities of their characters, as well as look for clues of who the murder is. In the third, and final, round, they will try to determine and accuse the person they believe is the murderer. When it begins, members can move to breakaway rooms on the chat platform to try and solve the mystery. You can all agree to have dinner as part of the event, while members can dress for the part if they wish.
How does it help to improve communication?
When your team plays the murder mystery game online, the only way they can solve the clues is by communicating. They’ll find innovative ways to decipher what’s happening, which will then encourage them to deal with tasks and problems with work in the same way. It’s also a fun way to take their minds off the stress of working remotely, and you might find they’ll work more closely together in the weeks that follow.
How does it help to improve problem-solving skills?
At its core, the murder mystery online game requires your team to solve a critical problem: who murdered the victim. They may not realise it during the event, but it’s helping them develop skills they can take into the workplace. While they won’t be working through a killing when it comes to corporate tasks, they can use similar methodologies with new inspiration and motivation to tackle daily goals.
Choose Making Teams to create stronger teams
If you’ve never hosted a murder mystery team building game before, we understand that it may feel intimidating doing so, especially as an employer. Fortunately, Making Teams can assist you by facilitating it on your behalf. We’ll also ensure that everyone receives the materials they need to play it online.
Should you decide that using murder as a theme isn’t the way to go, you can check out any of our other online virtual games. Feel free to contact us if you’re looking for any advice.
Remote Team Building & Connecting Virtually: 3 Tips to Build Rapport
According to Gallup studies, increasing employee engagement is one of the key factors for business success. However, with work from home (WFH) becoming a default and most connections done via Zoom or other digital tools instead of face-to-face interactions, it is increasingly difficult for management to engage their employees and foster rapport.
If you’re looking for ways to bridge the gaps between people in your company, read on because this blog will provide information and tips for remote team building that’ll help your employees feel more connected.
What happens when employees feel disconnected?
If employees become detached to their co-workers and their company, they may start disengaging. Without feeling any sense of affiliation or belonging, they might put in less of themselves into the work they produce. Uncertainties about their performance, goals or even if they are going to keep their jobs can overwhelm them and put them in a state of distrust with the management.
Fundamentally, employees want to stay informed and feel included through regular communication and online team building. Even though 60% of the companies believed they’ve done enough to bridge the gap, nearly 80% of employees surveyed disagreed.
Why is connection amongst colleagues important?
In Gallup’s studies, it was found that adequate employee engagement can have a significant impact on a company’s overall performance. Employee engagement not only increases customer ratings by 10% but also raises profitability by 22% and productivity by 21%!
What’s more, when employees feel included and a part of the team, they tend to feel more focused and committed to achieving corporate goals. Evidently, such emotional gratification can also lower turnover, absenteeism (37%) and cause fewer safety incidents and quality defects.
Tips to build rapport
There is so much to gain when your company is fully engaged with the employees. Here are three tips that will make your team feel more connected:
1. Establish regular communications
Managers should take the initiative to reach out to their team members regularly to understand their progress and difficulties. If a physical meeting is not possible, leveraging digital tools for virtual meetings are good options too. Alternatively, organising a remote team building activity could be a great way to bring the entire team together.
2. Offer help
A great way to build rapport is to offer help whenever you notice employees struggling or having difficulty coping. With remote working, many employees tend to work in silos and suffer in silence because they find it harder to reach out to others for help. If you can show you care enough to help them with such small issues, they’ll feel valued and more positive to commit to their tasks.
3. Recognise and empower
Empowering your team members to take action and make decisions is essential to establishing trust. When you recognise their abilities and effort, they will feel more like a trusted individual in the company. Similarly, award praises or rewards whenever appropriate. It’s the best way to let employees feel that their hard work is being appreciated.
Making the best out of working virtually
WFH might have made communications with your team a lot harder but there is an increasing number of digital tools designed to bridge these gaps. A quick search online and you’ll find ample options like online team building sites, virtual whiteboard for sharing information and Zoom for virtual meetings. Such tools are must-haves that will make workflow more productive and efficient.
Importantly, all these digital platforms come with comprehensive instructions that will guide you through even simple steps like how to use Zoom and how to change Zoom background. They are easy to understand and incorporate into your daily work.
Build strong connections in the workplace with Making Teams
Companies must pay extra attention to employee engagement and communication to ensure a healthy, thriving workplace and business success. One simple way to do this is to organise remote team building activities with Making Teams, a dedicated company that has been providing high-quality virtual team building activities to clients around the world. Try our virtual Treasure Hunt or online Murder Mystery or get in touch with us to find out more.
Virtual Team Building: Which Activity is Best For Your Team?
Having a strong team can mean the difference between success and failure. COVID-19 has most of the workforce working predominantly from home, which can result in a lack of communication, create distance, and potentially even distrust, amongst co-workers. This can affect team coherence. Managers have to make the extra effort to ensure their teams know each other, interact often, and have strong connections.
Why is building a strong team important?
Strong teams are productive and efficient and can achieve a great many things. Working from the office facilitates organic rapport building, while remote working can stunt office bonding and the development of relationships. A study published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology in 2016 found that if employees have strong work friendships, the likelihood of them exhibiting innovative behaviour at work is higher.
Making Teams Singapore provides a viable solution to increase interaction amongst your team members with its virtual team building games, which includes Escape Room and Amazing Race. In this blog, we provide a few pointers to help you decide between the two.
Determine your type of team and how it functions
Before deciding on a corporate team building activity, and if you should go with Escape Room or Amazing Race, determine the type of team you have. By knowing the teams and how they function, you are in a better position to determine what form of integration and collaboration activities you should incorporate to help them work more cohesively.
Four types of teams:
- Functional work team – Team members belong to the same functional area and report to a manager. Departments such as Accounting and Maintenance usually have such a structure.
- Cross-functional team – The team is made up of members with different expertise to contribute to a complex project. Boards of Directors or project teams are good examples of such team structure.
- Self-managed team – Such a team doesn’t have a leader but employees work collaboratively to achieve a common goal. Commonly adopted by startups and small businesses, the team would organise their tasks and decision-making amongst themselves.
- Troubleshooting team – The team is created to improve a specific process or product. Members are often sent to different departments to provide solutions.
Decide what you want to achieve with this team activity
Next, decide what are your objectives for wanting to organise a team-building activity. There are a few common goals that you can take reference from:
- Get fellow team members acquainted
- Increase trust and cohesiveness within the team
- Improve soft skills such as motivation, creativity, communications and emotional quotient (EQ)
- Improve morale and engagement amongst employees
With a clear objective in mind, you can then develop a sound team-building plan that not only suits your stakeholders but more accurately eliminates sore points in the team and restores confidence.
Comparing virtual games
With remote work, more companies are choosing virtual games as their preferred team-building option because they are effective, fun and easy to execute since they transcend physical distance. Importantly, there is a wide selection of virtual games designed to match different team-building objectives and types of teams.
Here are two virtual team-building programmes that are favoured by many companies: Escape Room Online and Amazing Race Online.
Virtual Escape Room
The Escape Room team building activity is designed to help your team cultivate communications and organisational skills while getting to know one another. Each participating team would be ‘virtually’ locked in a room and they are required to solve a string of riddles and challenges before they can break free. The winning team is the one that can complete the challenges at the fastest speed. Virtual Escape Room comes with three different options and can be tailored to best match your company’s budget and requirements.
Virtual Amazing Race
Much like the TV show ‘The Amazing Race’, Making Teams’ Amazing Race activity is action-packed and highly experiential. Participants are divided into teams to find different destinations and complete tasks that last between a couple of minutes to an hour. The tasks comprise Cultural Riddles and Cultural Activities that require the team to unravel as a team and eventually complete all challenges at the fastest speed to take the top prize.
Build a strong team with Making Teams
Embracing virtual team-building might be a new concept but many organisations have started investing in virtual team-building due to COVID-19. There is no reason to compromise your team activities just because of physical distance.
Jump on the bandwagon with Making Teams to discover a new and virtual way of team-building. Making Teams has been a dedicated team providing high-quality virtual and onsite building programmes to clients around the world since 2005. Reach out to us to learn more.