But seeing each other at our in-person team retreats have always been an integral part of our culture and are a massive part of building team cohesion.

We previously aimed for a full team retreat twice a year. After a fun and productive team meeting in Barcelona in February 2020, we were already anticipating the summer meeting when we would see each other again.

Sadly, the global pandemic had other plans. The world turned upside down, including the world of workshops and work retreats, too. While we were fortunate enough to have remote working as our default setting, remote team building is still a topic we are looking to master.

We have tried a range of online team events in the past year and half: escape rooms, virtual scavenger hunts, self-designed holiday team events. Alongside our weekly team lunches these have done a good job of helping us stay connected as a team. Yet we have been very much looking forward to the opportunity to come when we can see each other live without taking unnecessary pandemic risks.

After some logistical rearrangement and thorough planning, we were able to find a spot to meet together as an (almost) full team!

Here are some key takeaways from our team trip we hope will help you when planning your own company retreat!

1. Accept that logistics will take more time and things can change

We’ve always tried to find a nice and inspiring location for our meetings. We wanted to ensure that our 2021 company retreat was no exception! 

As a result of the global pandemic, we had some additional considerations. We thought long and hard about where everyone on our globally distributed team had the best chance to arrive. 

And first and foremost, it is important to align with your team if you are collectively fine to take the implications of international travel with regards to the pandemic situation, and decide if you go for a live meeting or stay virtual.

We had to consider the impact of travel restrictions, vaccination passports and visa requirements while also keeping everyone on the team safe. We also wanted to find a place where we could be isolated from larger crowds while still having access to amenities. 

Croatia was not a hard choice for us, given that it minimised the number of border crossings our team collectively had to take and was relatively easy for everyone to reach. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Croatia has a wonderful seaside! 

For several weeks we monitored the covid case numbers and waited to make travel bookings until we felt fairly certain that new restrictions wouldn’t be put into place. While this meant more expensive tickets, this meant we could be flexible in the event we had to reschedule or find a different location for our company retreat.

The extra attention to detail and decision making took a more time to organise than previously, but it was important we got everything right in order to bring the team together safely and effectively. 

Plan additional time and budget for team retreats under such circumstances, and have a back-up prepared. In the event of another global lockdown, we were ready with an all-virtual retreat too.

2. Prepare for hybrid scenarios

While our team retreats are among the most anticipated events of the year, there can be a range of reasons why someone might be unable to join. 

Whether such a decision is due to cautiousness around pandemic travel, personal circumstances or unexpected last-minute events, it’s important to acknowledge and respect the personal choice of everyone in your team.

Just because someone is unable to travel doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be involved in the company retreat. It’s important to think through the agenda and consider when and how you will be able to involve the people who can’t join in live.

In our case, one of our team members wasn’t able to join us in Croatia. Knowing this in advance gave us a chance to prepare and shape our agenda accordingly. 

Prepare the tech to allow remote participation

A large portion of our company retreat was a 2-day workshop on defining our team values and culture. With topics like these, it’s essential to receive contributions from everyone in the team.

Remote participation for fully virtual retreats is simple in that everyone has an equal entry point. Everyone has their own device and so each participant can see and hear one another clearly and without interference. 

Every hybrid set-up is different, though in our case we would have a single remote participant in a room of eight. In our case, we used a single laptop with one microphone and speaker for our remote participant to be present in the room. 

This meant that we reduced possible interference, limited the impact on our internet connection and also ensured there was as little tech in the room as possible.

Having a computer in front of everyone when sitting around a table is naturally not a great setup for live interactions, especially when doing any type of exercise (e.g. grouping cards or post-it notes on the table)

What we ended up using for our hybrid setup was:

• A single MacBook running Zoom
• a GoPro Hero 8 camera with a very wide angle that allowed us to capture everyone at the table  
• External speaker: Initially we tried with the laptop speakers, but the voice output was not ideal, so we ended up connecting an external “party” speaker that was available at the location. After adjusting the sound levels and reducing bass output, we found the voice was loud and crystal clear
• The inbuilt microphone on the Macbook. This was also not ideal as it required everyone in the room to speak more loudly than normal though we unfortunately didn’t have a better one available. Next time, we would bring a high quality microphone to ensure remote participants could hear everything being said without issue. 

This worked well with one remote participant, and could possibly scale with more people connecting while still using only one computer input for the live group. If we were having multiple remote participants from different locations, then it would be useful to consider a dedicated laptop screen for each participant so they can be seen the same way.

This embodiment of the remote participant meant they effectively had a seat at the table. This was extremely effective in helping the hybrid collaboration work for all parties.

Hybrid meeting difficulties and how to manage them

Still with a relatively adequate video conferencing setup we had a couple of things we learnt how to do better:

• Lack of non-verbal feedback for remote participants: The non-verbal communication that you observe so easily on people around is barely noticeable for the remote participants. 
  • Tip: whenever remote team members comment, acknowledge verbally that you’ve heard them and if you agree or disagree.
• Sharing whiteboard content: any notes written on a physical whiteboard is nearly impossible to see through a webcam from several meters away. 
  • Tip: Either have a dedicated camera zoomed in on the whiteboard, or have somebody take pictures and share them regularly with remote participants.
• Involving in interactive activities – e.g. brainwriting type of activities where you note ideas on post its:
  • Tip: We had them written up in Slack and somebody copied them on post-its while others were presenting.

Involvement in games, icebreakers and social activities

While the tips above – and a degree of empathy and patience both from live and remote team members – can help to get remote participants to be heard and involved at important work discussions, there are also the social activities that might make up your company retreat. 

Not everything can be done with remote participants, especially as a great deal of non-work interaction happens spontaneously, but with some foresight you can plan a more inclusive event. 

Here are a few tips for energiser activities that work for hybrid setups.

• Simple games like Giants-Wizards-Elves or a rock-paper-scissors tournament work great in hybrid set-ups. The rules are easy to understand, it’s easy for people in different locations to interact with one another and the slight delay can add laughter to proceedings too. Try to have someone in charge of pairing up players and ensuring remote participants are included. This can keep things moving and help the group all have fun. 

• Physical activities that get everyone moving like Shake Down can also make all the difference in a hybrid company retreat. Remote participants in particular are likely to be seated for a long time and we all know that Zoom fatigue is real! Getting everyone moving is a great activity that can bring some silliness to energy to proceedings!

Outside of scheduled work time, it’s also great to include some social activities where team members from remote locations can join in. Sadly, we only realised after two hours of playing self-defined charades that this would be a perfect activity for a hybrid team setup. Something to keep in mind for next time! 

3. Focus on what is hardest to do online

Prior to the pandemic, we used our live team meetings to align on strategy, plan the upcoming quarters, and workshop more complex product challenges.

After almost 2 years of the pandemic, we had run and improved each of these activities in virtual settings. As a team, we felt that building human bonds with one another is more difficult to do online and so we wanted this to be the focus of our team retreat..

Many of us on the team have kids and thus parental duties call them home after work hours, while others are dedicated to hobbies and sports. In any busy company, it can be hard to find time to just organically hang out and to get to know each other better. (Organised time helps though!)

We also felt that we hadn’t previously aligned together as a team on values and culture. Culture and attitude fit is one of the most important factors we look for when looking for new people to join our team. Yet this was undocumented and so not clearly spelled out for everyone. 

Such a process requires a lot of complex conversation to really understand what matters to everyone, and to align on the values we altogether find the most important.

For this team retreat, we decided to focus on:

• Defining our core values
• Aligning on our team culture
• Teambuilding and give enough opportunity and free time for people to bond

4. Facilitation

It is tempting to think that the working sessions of a team retreat are just like any other intra-company meetings and that we’ll get by with the usual level of facilitation done by managers and other team members. So why not just do the same again here?

• Being a facilitation enthusiast myself, I enjoy designing and facilitating workshops. But the last time I facilitated a team culture workshop was more than 5 years ago. Having someone who is both an experienced facilitator and an expert makes a big difference in the outcomes.
• Hiring a good facilitator and taking your whole team to a retreat comes with a price tag.  But remember: spending everyone’s time well in a properly facilitated session and leaving with a sense of accomplishment and motivation after 1.5 years of not seeing each other is worthy of your time, effort and money.
• Don’t mix roles: The role of a facilitator is to create participation while staying neutral. Facilitating a technical planning session as a team member might be okay, but leading the process of define culture and values is nearly impossible to do neutrally as both a participant and a facilitator.
• Allow everyone to participate fully: Not being the facilitator myself also allowed me to fully participate in the conversation without having to think of group facilitation. I also didn’t feel exhausted by wearing multiple hats, so I still had energy to spend good time with our team members. Win-win!
• Have a dedicated person controlling the room (live and virtual): When seeing your colleagues, it’s great to be able to spend time with them without needing to control the room and the agenda. Having a dedicated person who watches out for everyone being able to participate and keeps the group on schedule. 

The list could go on, and we were super happy to have a great facilitator running our 2-day team values workshop – credits to Ivana!

We are also grateful for Ivana to bring our attention to positive psychology – we used the first day of our workshop to deep dive into identify our core strengths and highlight the strengths we see in each other too. 

Getting to know your strengths is an important part of positive psychology. Gallup’s research has shown that people who get to practice their strengths on a daily basis are three times more likely to be satisfied with their lives and six times more likely to be engaged at work so it really does pay off to bring your strengths to your awareness.

We used the VIA Character Strengths Survey and Positran’s Strengths Cards for that exploration. Everyone had a chance to get to know their strengths, reflect on how he or she uses them at work/home and understand what advantages they bring to their lives. 

We also got to know each other through learning more about everyone’s strengths and what each member has to bring to the team. Finally, we also collectively reflected on what are the team’s strengths – which need not be the same as the strengths of individuals in the team. The whole dive in this topic left people feeling energized, proud and with lots of good insight. 

Some extra comments from the facilitator’s perspective:

• Remember to have people moving around as much as possible, have them do work on their feet, ask them to write something down on the flipchart, use energizers frequently so to keep people on the move
• In a hybrid setting make sure to check often enough with the person joining virtually how they’re doing and whether or not something needs to be changed in the setting so they can participate more easily 
• Smile and have fun :)

For the Values and Culture Definition process, we used the Culture Design Canvas – credits to Gustavo Razzetti for sharing this framework in the SessionLab facilitation library.

We found it an effective way to structure our thinking and engage productively with what can be an especially complicated process! 

5. Work vs social time

Finding a good balance between work and social time is important – especially when you see your teammates so rarely in person.

When bringing people to a nice location that requires long travel, be sure to allow time and space for them to enjoy it. You want the event to be memorable and fun, as well as productive. You have no reason to pull long working hours and burn everyone out!

Remember that the idle time spent next to the pool chatting, eating, or walking to the beach are often the place to have the conversations that build team bonds.

Lastly, give people private time (enough breaks) to catch up with family left at home. Many of us have partners and small kids at home, and getting away from them for nearly a full week is less difficult if there is ample time to communicate. 

We were also sure to include a completely work free day. This was a great opportunity to just hang out while participating in an activity. We went on a boat trip and explored some of Croatia’s natural beauty together! It was so nice to reflect and spend time together outside of our usual working environments.

6. Games to facilitate social interaction

Games and icebreakers were also an important part of building bonds at our company retreat. During working hours, this meant including some energizer games and icebreakers in the agenda to keep things fresh while also ensuring we spent time engaging socially. 

Practical and fun energizer games

Go bananas is a great simple energizer we used twice – once with the phrase Go Bananas and a second time with the Queen song We Will Rock You. Both occasions resulted in high energy and laughter, which was great! Remember that just having fun together and being a little silly can help build bonds between members of your team. 

We also found the equilateral triangles collaboration game to be fun, energizing and instructive too. Moving around and using non-verbal communication to complete the game was a great way to generate laughter and bring new flavours into the workshop. 

The fact it was a beautiful day in the sun didn’t harm things either!

When defining our company purpose, we also played a game where everyone came up with their definition using simple building blocks before explaining it to the group. This was a great way of bringing variety into the workshop and encouraged members of the team to share their creative sides. It was especially nice to see everyone’s different approaches and creations! 

Activities outside of working sessions

We also made sure to make time to go out for dinner as a group and learn more about each other in a relaxed atmosphere. It can be easy to take this kind of social interaction for granted and forget to include it in the agenda for your company retreat. Ordering pizzas and crashing around the kitchen table might work for you, but it’s worth remembering the benefits of a lovely sit down meal! 

Charades is a simple and really fun game to play, especially when you add a twist that everyone present can note down words and expressions to act out, and then we all play as a team to guess (except each time the person who submitted it). It gets fun when words from your own team’s subculture or the previous day’s events start appearing and you see your colleagues get extremely creative both in coming up with hard assignments and then acting out those!

We also brought a set of collaborative board games – where you don’t play against each other, but you rather need to win as a team against the game. Magic Maze was a team favorite this time – giving a good boost of energy while we worked together to escape and win :-)

In conclusion

It’s not easy running a great company retreat during a global pandemic. We found that by carefully planning and focusing on what was important to our team, we were able to build team bonds and be productive too. 

We hope that the above is helpful and might inspire you during your next team retreat, whether it’s hybrid, virtual or live! Have any thoughts or want to share what you did at your company retreat? We’d love to hear from you below!

At SessionLab, we felt it was important to hold a team session to close the year, have fun, reflect, and appreciate everything we had achieved. The goal was to raise spirits before people went away for the holidays, celebrate the year, and build team bonds and experiences that would persist into the New Year and beyond.

As a fully remote team, most of our meetings and team building events are virtual by default- our current team of 6 live in 5 different countries! While we usually meet twice a year in a live setting, the global pandemic of 2020 meant we had to find other ways to meet, work and build team spirit in a virtual environment.  

This is a challenge for organizations of all different shapes and sizes. Adapting to running events in a remote environment while still making them engaging and meaningful is tricky, but with careful planning and design, you can make your events enjoyable for all involved.

In this post, we’ll walk you through how we designed our virtual holiday party and share some tips and takeaways that can help you create effective, engaging virtual team events of your own!  

Nonetheless, the facilitation plan and exercises below work well for a live event, too! In fact, in most of the cases below, we tweaked some of our favorite team building activities to fit the virtual use case.

Goals of the holiday team event

Before the holiday season started, we knew we wanted to dedicate one afternoon to come together as a team, so we booked a three-hour slot that was fitting for our team across Europe. 

Once we’d decided on a time and date for the event, it was vital that we clarify what we wanted to achieve and outline the purpose of the event. As with any workshop, event, or meeting, considered planning is important in ensuring the event will be successful.

What we wanted to achieve:

• Have fun. We wanted to have a light-hearted event to energize the team and make people feel good. Due to the global pandemic, we couldn’t have our usual summer getaway, so it was especially important to have some more virtual occasions during the year for relaxed non-working time together.
• Reflect together on the highs and lows of the past year and create a shared story of the past twelve months.
• Show appreciation. While showing appreciation is something we do year-round, it’s important to find dedicated time to tell each other how much we appreciate working together. Positive feedback creates a lot of energy, and builds bonds – particularly after a challenging year! 
• Build connections. Although we are a small team, there are still people in the company working in different roles who don’t usually work with each other. Such events are great opportunities to get those people interacting and help everyone to feel more connected as a team. 

Timing

While we wondered if it wouldn’t be unusual to have a holiday party in the early afternoon, when we considered the needs and obligations of everyone involved, it made more sense for the whole team to be held during working hours. 

With some team members having kids at home or other obligations, it was important to make the event work for everyone. Our advice here would be to plan the event so it doesn’t eat into your employees free time and to consider time-zone implications when choosing when to hold your event. While it might be wine-o-clock for you, your colleagues overseas might just be waking up!  

Logistics / Video conferencing

Despite being a fully remote company since the beginning, Zoom-fatigue is something that we also do experience. For our end of year online event, we were looking for something more fun and engaging.

At the recent annual alumni getaway of Startup Wise Guys, we had the chance to try spatial.chat which brings back the element of navigating ‘physical space’ in a virtual meeting. The core concept is simple: you have a meeting room and if you (well, your avatar) stands close to someone, you can hear one another clearly and interact. If you move your avatar far enough away, you don’t hear them at all and as such, your group can move around and have breakout conversations organically.

A couple of other features that came handy:

• Ability for multiple people to share their screen, images or music. We weren’t bound to one person sharing like in most video conference tools and it helped create a more real-life alike atmosphere! 
• Pin images and videos to the background – this was particularly useful for some of the exercises we did.
• No app required to download – when it’s yet another video conf tool you’re using, and just for a single meeting, we all appreciate the quick access.

One takeaway here is to be open to changing up your video conferencing software based on the nature or purpose of the event. While there’s obvious value to using a tool everyone is familiar with, easy-to-use tools like spatial.chat (and alternatives such as gather.town) can bring fresh engagement while also keeping the entry barrier low.

It’s also worth noting that just as you would decorate a live space for the holidays, try doing so in a virtual space too! We picked a nice holiday-themed background and set some holiday music playing when we fired up the meeting room and it really helped create the right atmosphere!

Facilitation Design

When it came to designing and planning the virtual team event, it was important for us to get the right balance and provide space not only for fun but for reflection and appreciation.

Here’s how we approached designing the agenda for our virtual end of year event: 

We knew our agenda would have a couple of more thoughtful exercises that included reviewing the year and giving focused appreciation to one another, so we wanted to fill in the gaps before and after them with more active and fun activities including an icebreaker, quiz and awards ceremony. 

We also knew that we would split facilitation duties between our two co-founders. Remember that when running any event, it’s always good to have a primary facilitator to make sure the agenda runs smoothly while having a co-facilitator can make the facilitation process even easier. 

When planning and designing the agenda, we used SessionLab to block out the facilitation plan and collaborate on creating a virtual event that satisfied our needs and fit neatly into the 3 hours we had allocated. Let’s take a look at the step by step agenda and explain the goal of each section.

Holiday team event agenda

We had the following main activities in our year closing session, which we’ll break down for you step-by-step below:

• Gathering & Intro (10 mins)
• Breaking the Ice: Collaborative Song-writing (15 mins)
• Review the Year: History Map (45 mins)
• Break
• Fun Competition: Quiz (35 mins)
• Give Appreciation: The Bus Trip Exercise (40 mins)
• Awards (20 mins)

See how this adds up on a timeline:

If you want to use this template for your own session, check out the complete agenda which includes practical tips and tricks for running the session too. (You can create your own copy of the agenda in SessionLab and tweak it to make it fit for your own team event.)

0. Preparations and Briefing

Ensuring everyone knows about the event and can prepare and allocate time accordingly is the first step in making your online party or event happen.

We wanted this to be a light-hearted, fun event. In the invitation, we asked that everyone dress for the fun, holiday theme if they wished. While some of us appeared in fun Xmas sweaters and Santa hats, it’s especially memorable when one of your colleagues turns up in a full-body giraffe outfit! 

One final item we included in the invitation was a point of what not to bring. We asked everyone to come to the event with an open mind and heart and to remove other distractions. As with any meeting or workshop, it’s important to set clear expectations of your participants and ensure everyone is on the same page – even if that means getting ready to have fun!

1. Gathering and Introduction (10 mins)

The first step for your virtual party or meeting is bringing everyone together! Assuming it’s a tool that not everyone is familiar with, allow a few minutes of time so everyone can experience using the tool. 

Also remember to ask participants to close (minimize) all other apps, tabs, etc. so there are no distractions during the event.

When using our chosen video conferencing tool, spatial.chat, there were some actions we asked everyone to try in order to become comfortable using the app:

• Move your avatar: your volume and what you hear will adjust with the distance
• Try the Megaphone – if you have something important to say
• Zoom in to see people’s face in proper size
• Stay in the first room (since we had multiple rooms in created for the event)

If you’re using any new tool or software for your virtual party, consider having a small checklist of actions to try when starting your event so you can cut down on downtime later. 

2. Break the ice: Collaborative song-writing (15 mins)

Even with established teams, it’s important to get people into the holiday mood and encourage creativity and collaboration. 

There are a lot of options you can choose from depending on your group size and preference. If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out our blog post on icebreaker games and online energizers for more great activities you can use to kick-off your online office party. 

In the holiday spirit, we went with a collaborative song-writing exercise where pairs had to write their own verse of the Jingle Bells song: creating new lyrics that fit the existing rhythm. It’s a nice twist if they incorporate something in the lyrics that is related to your own company and culture:

Steps to take:

• Brief the exercise (make sure everyone is reminded of the rhythm of Jingle Bells!)
• Announce pairs and ask them to create and open a Google Doc per each pair where they can co-edit the lyrics.
• Ask the pairs to move into a separate discussion circle (“breakout room”) in  your meeting space so they don’t hear/disturb each other. With our background, we had designated spots such as ‘by the Christmas tree’ or ‘next to the fire.’
• Give 5 minutes to write the new verse in pairs 
• Regroup with everyone. Ask each pair to recite their rhyme/verse. Bonus points for singing! 
• Congratulate each pair of authors as you create your own company version of Jingle Bells.
• Make sure you capture and save your verses in one place for the future!

And what did we come up with? Here is one of the verses (start humming Jingle Bells before you read it below!

“SessionLab, SessionLab,

workshops all the way

What fun it is to drag-and-drop,

And timing calculates”

Does it really rhyme? That’s up to you to decide. But it was a fun time spent together creating it!

3. Year Review Exercise – History Map (45 mins)

The main purpose of this activity is to remind and reflect on what group members or participants have been through and to create a collective experience and shared story. It also creates opportunities to celebrate highlights, bring individual experiences to the group, and create closure on the events of the previous year. 

Steps to run this exercise: 

• As preparation, set up a virtual whiteboard with a timeline representing the last year. Include dates and a few key events, but not too much detail.
• Introduce the exercise to the group and share the link to the virtual whiteboard. 
• Invite the team to populate the timeline with their key experiences (give 15 initially + extend with 5 if needed). Ask the group to include highlights and lowlights of the journey as well as insights, emotional highs and lows, challenges, successes, frustrations, stories and surprises, situations, learnings, and anything else that meant something to them in the past year.
• Next, give everyone 5 or 10 minutes to individually reflect on the timeline and see what their colleagues have contributed.
• Pin highlights and have everyone explain the moment that has been the most important or meaningful to them. 

The result is a nice visual asset that recaps the year your team left behind while also including space for everyone’s individual perspective. Make sure to have this available for future reference. It’s fun to look back on this a year or so later! 

4. Break

Even at a virtual party, it’s important to include time for a break. This might mean giving participants time to get away from the screen, refill drinks or simply take a comfort break. We found this midway point the perfect time to have a quick break, though you have some wiggle room based on the needs of your group.

5. Fun Competition: Quiz (35 mins)

As per the flow of the session, it was time to have a lighter exercise after the previous reflection session. 

This time we competed in teams while remembering what happened in the past year. We prepared a series of questions, around 15-20, referring to some events and achievements relevant to our team. (Alternatively, you may include some trivia questions, too)

When preparing the questions, make sure that the questions are diverse enough so everyone will have some questions that they have the knowledge to answer on Similarly, make sure you set up diverse groups of 3-4 people.

Practical directions for the groups:

• Arrange yourself so you can hear the facilitator and each other, but not the other group.
• Each group opens a shared document where they will record their answers.(As the facilitator, you can prepare that beforehand for each team with numbers for each question. That saved at least 2-3 minutes if not more during the event)
• Ask that the groups not research online for the answer and just use their own knowledge and best guesses, it’s based on trust.
• When ready, the facilitator starts by reading out the questions one by one.
• Once all questions have been answered by each group, swap the documents between groups and have the other group mark the answers as the facilitator reads them out. Each group gets 1 point for each correct answer.
• Declare a winner! If you have resources, give out prizes or simply give the winning group bragging rights.

Looking for alternatives? Check out our virtual team building activities post to see other games that can work great at your online event or virtual Christmas party! For example, virtual scavenger hunt is a great bet if you have a large number of people you wish to split into multiple groups. 

6. Give Appreciation – The Bus Trip Exercise (40 mins)

By this point we’d had some fun and reflected broadly on the previous year. Celebrating the accomplishments of the organization as a whole is a vital part of the year end party, but it’s also important to celebrate each other and give appreciation for the work we’ve done together over the year. 

Strong and meaningful interpersonal connections are the foundation of any organization and taking time to give positive feedback can help make them stronger. When you hear about your strengths from others and receive acknowledgement of your work and working attitude, it also builds your motivation, self-confidence and sense of psychological safety.

We have several exercises that allow people to express appreciation in the SessionLab library and one of our favorites is the Bus Trip from Thiagi Group.

The Bus Trip is a great exercise to use at the end of a session or as part of a project retrospective. It’s very energizing and produces lots of smiles, laughs, and sometimes even a teardrop or two. 

In a live setting, we’d begin by arranging seating to create the impression of an imaginary bus that runs on positive energy. Ask participants in one row to give as much positive feedback as possible to the participants seated in the opposite row in 45 second runs. By rotating seats, you can ensure a great deal of positive feedback is shared among the group.

To recreate this exercise in a virtual environment, we made the following adjustments to simulate the physical environment:

• Add a grid (x times 2 grid depending on how many participants you have) as an image which represents the two rows of ‘seats’ on the bus. These seats are where participants will sit and rotate throughout the exercise. 
• The width of each grid cell should be big enough so that if two people position themselves in the middle they won’t hear the conversation of the next pair. While you could achieve this effect by having breakout rooms in other video conferencing tools, spatial.chat made it easy to move between pairs quickly and easily. 
• In each appreciation round, each participant has 45 seconds to give appreciation to their partner using prompts such as: What I like about you is; what I appreciate about you is; I feel happy whenever you…
• Bus Trip is a fast-paced activity, so it’s important that everyone is aware of the timing when giving feedback. We opened https://timer.pizza/ in a separate browser and screenshared it to the meeting room so everyone was working from the same timer.
• As facilitator, make sure to give very clear instructions when people rotate: nominate who will stay seated (one person must not rotate while everyone else does, in order for everyone to get to speak with everyone), and confirm when the new rounds are starting. It can also be useful to display prompt sentences in the meeting room to help your group get started. 

When you brief the exercise, give 3-5 minutes for people to reflect and note down anything they may want to say to the people they talk to. Feel free to adjust this time based on the size of the group. By giving this prep time, you can help ensure that everyone can give thoughtful and meaningful appreciation to the rest of the team.

The result of the Bus Trip is a fast, uplifting exercise that leaves the group with wide smiles and meaningful feedback.

7. Awards (20 mins)

It’s commonplace to hand out awards at year-closing ceremonies or end of year parties. For us, we didn’t feel that a serious awards ceremony would be fitting for this cheerful holiday event. Acknowledging and rewarding hard work is important for any organization, though this should also be doing at the right time and via the correct channels. 

As a small team, we felt that celebrating and promoting collaboration was a better approach than competition. In this case, we decided our end of year event would take a more light-hearted and fun approach to allocating rewards.

As a remote team, it was also interesting to see how we perceive each other. In this sense, the awards format served double duty as a getting to know you better exercise and a fun way to wrap up the session. 

For this exercise, we brainstormed a set of offbeat ‘Who is the ….?’ type of questions prior to the session in a shared document. During the session, we then voted on who most likely fit the category using ahaslides.com. This meant that everyone could vote anonymously and we could instantly see results via a screenshare in the meeting room.

The quickfire nature of the exercise and the questions asked injected a sense of fun into the event and hearing who we felt was best dressed, most likely to become a dictator or be abducted by aliens were great conversation starters too!

A couple of practical things to keep in mind:

• If you have a small team, be sure to pick a wide assortment of questions so everyone is likely to ‘win’ some nominations and feel included
• Only include questions that have no negative connotations. This exercise is designed to create a cheerful mood and make everyone feel good
• Invite your team to contribute to creating the questions before the session. This not only helps keep things varied but also helps increase engagement too!

In order to conduct this exercise online, we had to find an app that allowed simple online polling without a need to log in which could then display results immediately after the poll for each question was closed. We went with ahaslides.com for this purpose, though there are other options out there.

(As an alternative you can vote offline prior to the meeting and then present the results at the session. While this saves some time, the dynamics of this exercise are more engaging when you mix vote and result presenting on the spot.)

And what questions did we use?

Who would be the:

• Best dressed?
• Most mysterious?
• Best person to take home to mom?
• Have the most organized workspace?
• Biggest coffee gourmand?
• Would be the DJ at a team event?
• Most likely to be found outdoors?
• Most astute observer? (notices small details – e.g. when you have a new haircut)
• Most likely to be a dictator?
• Best traveled?
• Who would survive best in the post-apocalypse? (mad-max style!)
• Who would be the best poker player/ who has the best poker face?
• Most likely to be abducted by aliens?
• Who is the easiest person to read? (most expressive)
• Most likely to spray hair yellow to attend/rave at a Scooter concert?

We found this exercise a great way to end the event and raise spirits before leaving for the holidays. While we didn’t include any prizes beyond bragging rights for either the quiz or the awards ceremony, in retrospect even a small, symbolic or fun prize would have been a good idea.  

Wrap up

After all the uplifting appreciation and award giving, it was a good moment to wrap up the main activities of the session and wish everyone a happy holiday. We were also sure to schedule the event so that anyone who wanted to stay could chat and mingle afterward. Creating space for your team to have more fun and continue conversations from the main activities is time well spent! 

On reflection, while the key principles of a holiday team building activity are present in both live and online environments, there is an additional layer of preparation and technical admin to ensure it runs smoothly. Be sure to plan accordingly and do a dry run of any new tools you’ll be using.

There are also a lot of small considerations that can make a remote session more engaging – starting from small things such as ensuring shared documents and assets are properly prepared, to timers, background music and breaks. While it might be tempting to wing-it and just bring everyone together for an end of year event with conversation and drinks, it really helps to plan your agenda and come prepared. 

While a virtual party or end of year event might not have been your initial choice, given the global pandemic and increasingly remote nature of work it’s a great way to come together and celebrate the year, whatever the circumstances. 

Did you run a holiday team event or to review the year and celebrate? Do you plan on running similar events in the future? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

How can technology get you into the flow when preparing and delivering your training? How can you save time when managing your training? Technology brings plenty of opportunities for different professions, but what about the training field?

Come, see and share your experience on how digital technologies can help trainers in their work. We would like to present some tools specifically designed for trainers, and hear how are your training preparation practices supported (or not) by technology.

Therefore, we invite you to join us for an after-work meetup at the Springest office (www.springest.nl) in Amsterdam. Springest is the biggest training marketplace online and we and we are happy to have them as our hosts. The doors open from 18:30, and the program will start at 19:00. We plan to finish the official part by 20:00. Afterwards we will continue with snacks, drinks and networking.

Register on meetup.com or facebook.

In case you are interested in meeting us, but cannot attend the meet up, are still welcome to write to us and we can try to arrange a meeting. We will be in Rotterdam from 15th to 22th October.