Are you bored because you have to sit at home for 2 months? I have a solution for you. In this article, I’ll show you games which are great to play with your colleagues during work. And at the same time, you’ll practice Scrum rules. Great idea, huh? But before that, we have to say a few words about facts and myths about remote work and why virtual team building is so important.
Remote work facts and myths
- Remote work is boring
Probably for energy people who like contact with other people, it could be boring, but for these quiet, shy people it would be heaven. So it depends on what you prefer. And even if you are outgoing person remote work doesn’t have to be boring, because you’re not sitting with your colleagues. Really. At home, you can find more time for work rather than spending it on chatting with friends. As an effect, you’ll end your work earlier and spend the rest of your day more effective. And still, you can contact with your friends for example by group calls or video conferences.
My suggestions won’t make your work more interesting or funnier if you don’t like it. So I advise you to find more positives than negatives because even in the darkest things are these good and nice too.
- Working at the home is lonely and unhappy
When you thought about remote workers, what did you see? Lonely developer who rarely go out from home and only contact which he/she has is with pizza delivery man? You know that’s not true and in that time everybody who works remotely is the great example. Many people have to move to homes and start working from there as a part of flattening the curve.
But if you feel lonely because you are the only person at home, start calling your family, friends. Rebuild contact with them, organize some work for your brain so it won’t think about it. Watch your favourite comedy, series, find a new hobby or go for a walk. If you don’t have any allergy to pets I’m sure that little sweetie will warm your heart and help you not feel lonely.
- Virtual meetings are ineffective and waste of time
If you organize it for the first time, prepare a plan for yourself and run a meeting with an agenda. Schedule a little more time for virtual meetings but if you organize yourself well, everything will go well too. Also, you can give participants a homework before the meeting so you’ll be sure that everybody is ready to talk about the topic and you’re not wasting the time of your friends. If you want to warm the atmosphere at the beginning of the conversation, you can ask “how do you do” so your colleagues will feel more comfortable during the call.
Virtual team building
Some people for the first time work from home, and it may be strange for them because they have to find motivation and become self-efficient. For others, the situation of lockdown and working from home is less or more normal. But for everybody long-term sitting at home alone is not good. So how to be in contact with the team without meeting them face-to-face in the office? How to keep your team’s traditions and build up the team?
Virtual team building can look like everything you want. You can keep it as a traditional team building where you chat, talk, play games online, everything in a video conference. As you have a habit to go to restaurants once a week you can transform it into a cooking conference, where you share your best recipes or even cook “together” via conference call. Options for virtual team building are many and it depends on what you choose for your team. Maybe you have creative colleagues and you organize a session with puns or origami or you decided to show others your hobbies, pets or interests. Who knows.
It seems that building morals in the team and contacting with your friends is even more important than ever. If you haven’t practice team building ever maybe it’s the right time to do this. Think about it. I’m sure you find new ways to interact with the group
Games to master working remotely
Probably you heard and even play in Scrum/Agile games while introducing it to your team or just for fun as a part of Retrospective. You know they are good and funny. They are also a great way to learn something and find new ways to do something better, quicker and more effective. There is a proverb “the wish is father to the thought” or “necessity is the mother of invention” which is a great example of how new products grow. If you liked the previous games you probably like our suggestions too. Atlassian creates 6 games for you and your team which learns you how to work remotely better. There are games for:
- Stand-Ups for daily or weekly updates
- Project Poster to establish project goals and ways to achieve them
- Virtual Meetings for real feelings
- 4Ls Retrospective to learn from mistakes and gather real feedback from the team
- Learning circles for sharing updates
- My user manual to find members’ preferences
I think that’s a great way to master working remotely and learn something new, maybe even achieve new skills. Also, if you are looking for a tool to monitor your team look at Health Monitor from Atlassian.
Tell us how you keep a healthy mind during remote work so we could share it with the whole community 🙂 Also we have other interesting articles about Project Management
