Making Remote Work Fun with Remote Games
By: Radhika Mohta
Tags: Work From Home, Teambuildingactivities, Remotework, Employee Engagement

How It Started

What started as a 9pm daily online get-together for friends during lockdown turned into a six-figure revenue making stream this year. The ESFP in me, which is constantly evolving by the way, wanted to bring people together while we were growing physically apart. From Antakshari to memory games, storytelling to scavenger hunt — we tried it all. Like an Eklavya, I learned from the international hosts who were doing commendable work hosting engaging sessions in Creative Mornings and other communities.

As a relationship coach for independent singles, I also started hosting weekly virtual events for a women’s-only international community. Women joined in from SF, NYC, LA, Chicago and other cities to seek dating and relationship advice. Trivia: I was once locked out of my own Zoom event since I had ‘locked’ the room and my Zoom crashed and I had to mail everyone with a new link!

Wow! That feels like a decade ago! :D

Within a few weeks, I rolled it out as an offering — virtual employee engagement activities for companies. Since I wasn’t the only one working from home, missing out on conversations and serendipity that comes from a socially active life, I realised there would be others like me and I wanted to help. With my Zoom calls, I bring in an element of fun and play and surprise and break the monotony of everyday lives.

What Is It Now

A session is typically 50 minutes long. No additional preparation needed from the HR/ Founder setting up the call. Ideal group size is 20–25 people on a call. The maximum number of people I’ve had on one call ran up to 220 folks. While the number is not an issue, the engagement is certainly higher in intimate groups. People know each other, they show up for each other knowing that it is a team event and engage in conversations beyond the prompts or the game format.

Flavour of formats

Scavenger Hunt: A game of show & tell where you barely have 30 seconds to bring a household item in front of the webcam and show us to earn points. Also includes breakout room activities for collaboration. Some of the prompts can be customised to meet your company culture.

Digital Escape Room: A puzzle game played in teams where they may have to call a phone number that leads to a website that leads to a social media handle that leads to an email address. Your team plays detectives who are on a mission to unlock clues and rescue the host.

Game Show Extravaganza: Take some laughter yoga, add a little bit of Two truths One lie, throw in a dash of virtual dance party and finish it off with a hilarious scavenger hunt — and you’ve got the Game Show Extravaganza!

Skip The Small Talk: Most of the value that we reap from gatherings comes from the conversations we have during and after the event. Let’s skip the small talk and dive right into conversations that matter! Choose one of these topics: Growth + Change, Re-energize + Refuel, Failure + Iteration, Play + Creativity, Building Community. The prompts will invite sharing and active listening among attendees.

Zoom Challenge Game: Teams complete time-bound challenges to earn points. The challenges and tasks can be customised to meet your team’s personality and company culture. Tasks may include making a video of your team in best monkey faces. Finding an item that everyone on the team has, passing it on to each other and recording a video. Completing one-minute tasks, to name a few.

Chill Vibes: For a relaxed Friday evening, this works well. It includes a mindful exercise, 7-second drawing prompts, crowdsourced playlist, generously sprinkled surprise activities.

Team Trivia: Consider this like a fun award ceremony. Starts off with general knowledge ranging from history to pop culture and music, literature, sports and gets into specifics for your team to come up with audience choice winners. Like, who is the one with the maximum number of pets or subjected to ‘you are muted’ on most calls.

While we are at it, I sprinkle my sessions with surprises (oh, my first startup was WowSurprises and I loved enabling happy memories for people). Without divulging much, these surprises could be a BINGO or a quick challenge!

For the festive season, I introduce new formats that carry the flavour of that festival and recreates a sense of belonging. End of the day, everyone wants to be seen and heard. We are social beings and we want to belong.Therefore, no matter what the format is, the focus is on making everyone feel at home on that call. Welcoming new joinees, running a mood check, ensuring it is inclusive and allows everyone to make memories and have them as a takeaway in the form of a video clip — all this is important to me as a host.

As a host, I’ve made recommendations to not keep these calls on a weekend or late in the evening because people need their personal time to run errands, be with their family or just be off the screen. I try to divulge very little information to the HR/ coordinator since they are the ones always putting everything together yet not having fun.

Enabling the HR with a creative, Zoom link, description for the calendar invite and feedback form, along with screenshots, video clips, capturing the sentiment from the call and relaying back — all of this ensures that everyone can sit back and relax while I do my work. Your ROI is being measured and your team will tell you what they want next. Win win!

As for the pricing, it’s way less than what a team lunch/ beer party would cost your company. So the next time you’d like to have a team building session, celebrate birthdays or just have an element of fun added to your Town Halls, reach out with a Direct Message on Twitter or LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to help.

P.S. Shout outs from clients in a blog post and social media mentions here, here, here and here.

P.P.S. A short video clip from a Diwali session below.

Here’s to making remote work fun,

Radhika Mohta