One of the most common questions I get about virtual teams is “How can we build fun, trust, and confidence in a team if it has never met?”
This article will share a simple team building activity that you can do with virtual teams.
This is a team building exercise that involves a virtual scavenger hunting.
This article:
What is a “scavenger hunt”?
How can I use a virtual hunt at work?
How to run a virtual team huntStep 1 – Decide on the theme, length and duration
Step 2: Write your clues
Step 3: Decide how they’ll participate
Step 4: Share your clues
Step 5: Collect responses and celebrate
Are scavenger huntings good for team building?
Ideas for team building through scavenger hunts
Other ideas for building virtual teams
What is a “scavenger hunt”?
A scavenger hunt involves finding items from a list and solving the puzzle. It can be a game, competition between individuals or teams, or a game.
Sometimes, the items on the list can be activities to do. At the Tribe conference in 2019, for example, the scavenger hunt was held around Toronto. It included activities like taking photos of each person doing certain actions, e.g. Cycling a bike.
Me at the Tribe Conference
Teams had to locate different monuments in the area and take photos of themselves at certain locations or doing specific things.
This is great if you have an outgoing group that can physically all be in one space. However, this is not the case for many modern work teams.
We are not going to leave your desk.
How can I use a virtual hunt at work?
A virtual scavenger hunt can be a fun way to build trust and have fun with virtual teams.
This can be run as a WFH treasure hunting in a virtual team. A scavenger hunt allows you to find and share items with your group. The team will create a list of items, and then have the members of the group find them. They then share a picture of the item.
Images can be shared via email, Slack channel or Facebook for business.
Below is how I introduced the Office Scavenger Hunt to our Facebook group. Instead of doing it immediately with my work team, I did a test run in the group to see how it worked. Also, because the group is fun and people are willing to try it out, I knew they would!
How to manage a virtual team scavenger hunting
Here’s how you can run a virtual team of scavenger hunters:
Step 1: Decide on the topic and length
Step 2: Write your clues
Step 3: Decide how they’ll participate
Step 4: Share your clues
Step 5: Collect the responses and celebrate.
Let’s go over each step so you can understand how to make this work for your team.
Step 1: Decide on the topic and the length
Choose the theme and length of your scavenger hunt.
You will find some examples of scavenger hunt themes and ideas later in this article. You can choose something that is specific to your team, location, or tie it in with an event or holiday, for example.
Next, decide how long you will be doing the scavenger hunt. Because there is only one clue per day, I usually use a week. That’s enough. You don’t want to make it a tedious chore to participate any longer.
Step 2: Write your clues
Your team should make a list of items they will need to find during their scavenger hunt. You can give the entire list to your team at once or spread the items out over several days. Five items are sufficient – one per day if the activity is timed for a week.
H