To keep up a great team spirit it is important to regularly meet with your team members – also in a remote work setting. But how can you do remote team events on a larger scale?
What is a Remote Team Event and why use it?
Team events offer the opportunity to meet colleagues and team members outside regular work meetings – in a casual atmosphere. Usually we have several company wide events with 100 to 200 participants throughout the year, so we asked ourselves: how can we map that to a remote setting?
How to do it?
Provide a dedicated and always-open videoconferencing session for virtual coffee breaks as well as a mechanism to see if anybody is in the session before joining to lower the barrier.
Tooling
Even though a regular video conferencing tool like Zoom offers to host events with 200 and more participants, it is rather difficult to network as only one person can speak at a time (when one person speaks the other ones are automatically muted). Of course there are break out rooms, with which you can divide the group into smaller groups. But only the host can allocate the team members and it is not possible to see who is in which room.
Therefore we searched for a tool that can solve these problems and we finally found remo.co. Remo offers simple but helpful features:
- There is an event floor with tables for six people each
- On the event floor you can see who participates in the event and who is sitting at which table
- By double-clicking on a table, participants can easily switch between tables
- At each table you can see the other people sitting at the same table and talk to them (like a mini video conference)
- As a host you have a broadcast function, with which you can talk to all event participants at the same time
- It is even possible to design a branded event floor
Remo example floor plan
All in all Remo offers event participants more rights and due to the floor plan the feeling of being together at the same event is much stronger.
Games
It is always fun to have games at such an event and there are a lot of online games that you can play without being physically together. We were looking for games that do not take a lot of time, do not need a lot of explanation and are great fun. Our favorite game during the event was: skribbl.io: One person gets a word that she/he has to draw with the mouse - the other people have to guess the word in the game chat. The earlier you identify the word, the more points you get. The person with the most points wins the game. – simple but lots of fun!
Catering
On a good event, a good catering cannot be missing. We chose a simple way and gave out online vouchers for a supermarket chain to all event participants. This way everyone could get their favorite food and drinks.
The first remote team event went very well and the feedback was amazing. So we will have more remote team events soon.
