2020 has been a difficult year for businesses around the world. The coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic has seen the vast majority of us leave our commercial premises and operate on a remote basis for months on end. While retail stores, restaurants and cafes are now beginning to open back up with relaxed restrictions, many businesses managing office staff are choosing to continue working on a remote basis until the threat of the virus is significantly smaller, making life safer and easier for ourselves and our employees. But there are, of course, challenges to operating a remote team that you may have encountered since March this year. One that will we will focus on here is maintaining a sense of team spirit when everyone’s operating individually from their own space. Team spirit, bonding and communication are all essential when it comes to success. After all, if your team can’t work together, things can quickly become disjointed and projects and campaigns may not yield as successful results as they would otherwise. Here are just a few ideas that can help you to draw your team back together!

Hold Video Call Meetings

When you’re working in an office space, managers are likely to call team meetings on a regular basis to determine how the team’s work is coming along, identify areas that can be improved upon, overcome obstacles and start planning for future work, projects and campaigns. Meetings are a vital element to business operations that ensure everyone’s on the same page and that work is distributed fairly and equally. It’s important to maintain meetings, even when people can’t gather together in a single meeting room. There are countless different apps and programmes out there that allow this. Some of the most popular include Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams.

Carry Out Virtual Team Building

You can also carry out virtual team building activities over these different platforms. Get employees chatting with one another and encourage bonds. You could hold a video call quiz. You could set challenges. There’s all sorts you could do. You could also use a Virtual photo booth to get the team to bond over the fun pictures they take of themselves through it. Anything that gets people talking is going to improve communication and problem solving amongst your teams.

Set Challenges and Targets with Incentives

If there’s any way to get a team to pull together, it’s to set a challenge that will entice people’s competitive nature. An incentive added onto the challenge will encourage people to put in even more effort. Whether that’s a cash bonus, a voucher, an extra day’s annual leave or anything else you’re able to provide. Get team’s together and then set the challenge. People will then actively work together without feeling forced. They’ll enjoy the challenge!

It really is important that you maintain a sense of team spirit in your company when your team are working remotely. This will help to increase productivity and maintain high levels of staff satisfaction.