5-minute virtual team-building activities

Your employees may not understand the importance of team building so you can disregard the advantages of team bonding games. When you offer your employees a few 5-minute team-building activities that are not boring and dumb, your employees will surely enjoy it. Team-building exercises that are effective go beyond fun.

They help remote employees better understand one another -- how they think, work, what they believe, and what they enjoy. Suppose you want to do some virtual new hire orientation or simply bond your team closer together. In that case, you will find creative activities below to successfully host a very quick virtual employee engagement session. Based on your feasibility, these games could be modified or customized based on your teams.

Team building exercises that don't feel like a waste of time

Would you rather...?

Are you looking for a way to ignite a heated discussion in your meeting? Ask this or that question. Trust us when we say that the harder a question, the better the discussion.

We once asked: "Would you rather have 2-meter-long legs or 2-meter-long arms?" You would not believe the theories and thought processes that went into people's decisions!

How to play

Create a 'this or that' poll question, add two option choices, and enable the poll during your meeting. Ask people to vote and display the results. After you announce the winning option, ask both camps to explain why they voted the way they did.

Quiz of the week

Bring up a thought-provoking quiz question at the start of the meeting to get your colleagues energized. Let them guess away.

You can start a tradition of this. Ask your colleagues something interesting in your niche/field/industry, or tie the question to your presentation.

How to play

Use a multiple-choice poll. Specify your options and mark the best answer. Once ready to run the quiz poll, you must activate it and keep the results hidden. Once everyone has voted, reveal the correct answer.

Also, it's a good idea to give some background information before asking the quiz question to avoid presenting the question with no context.

Team trivia

Trivia is a great way to get to know your colleagues. Collect fun facts about your colleagues and construct a quiz based on them.

If you are running recurring meetings (e.g., weekly team meetings), you can decompose the team trivia questions into smaller chunks and run them one at a time.

If you want your team to get to know each other better, ask a question about a new team member each week, then give that person a chance to share some cool stories or facts about them.

How to play

Use a multiple-choice poll to create quiz questions. Questions and answers are shared with colleagues, and the colleague shares an explanation or funny story about the question. We are sure you will find lots of fun stuff!

Word cloud highlights

The word cloud will let you see the thoughts your meeting participants have expressed. Here's how it works: you ask a question, participants respond with a one- or two-question reply, and all the submissions combine to create a way to visualize everyone's thoughts.

One of the many ways you can use it is to get your teammates to share their personal and professional highlights before the meeting. It's a good way to get people chatting ahead of the meeting and learn something new about each other.

As a team, we love this survey at our all-marketing meetings), but it can serve as a great morale booster for almost any meeting.

How to play

Make a word cloud poll with the question "What were your highlights of the past month?" activate it, and ask your colleagues to submit their top moments.

Then display Slido in full screen, share comments on the submissions, and ask the authors of each to share their highlights with the group.

Draw your mood

At the beginning of a meeting, a nice icebreaker might ask how your colleagues are or how their weekend was. But this time, make it interesting.

Try asking your colleagues how they are rather than verbally asking them about their weekend plans. People's creative juices will flow, and they'll be lively and energized going into the meeting with this exercise.

How to play

Use a virtual whiteboard, such as Miro, or an integrated whiteboard within the video conferencing platform that you are using (such as Zoom Whiteboard) for online and hybrid meetings.

If you're in a physical space, ask people to draw on a piece of paper. Give them two minutes to complete their pieces, and then show everyone what they made.

Caption this

The following creative exercise may interest your teammates.

Show your colleagues a funny or thought-provoking picture, cartoon, or photo, and ask them to create a funny caption.

After showing the image, you can allow your colleagues 5 minutes to develop their creative ideas and then have a sharing session. You can even vote for the best one.

How to play

Your teammates can see the image well when you upload it to an open text poll and display it on the screen. Then, when they have decided on their answers, ask them to type them into an open text field.

Emoji quiz: guess the song

During one of our Brand team syncs, our colleague Martina prepared a cool quiz for us. She inspired this team-building exercise.

Some of the 80's song names were turned into emojis, and we had to guess which song was hidden behind the mysterious emoji combination.

Come up with your own or search for some inspiration online. Also, it doesn't have to be a song. You can also do this with movie titles.

How to play

Have your colleagues guess silently (have them write the answers on paper) while you present each emoji riddle. In the end, see which team has the correct answers.

Ice breaker question

One more great 5-minute team-building idea: Ask a thought-provoking question and have people discuss it in pairs or small groups.

If you ask a good icebreaker question, you could have a valuable discussion that helps your teammates socialize and get to know each other better.

How to play

Pair up your team members. You can set up breakout rooms if you're in a virtual/hybrid setting. Allow people 5 minutes to talk to their partner and learn something new about them (ideally, something they didn't know before). After the discussions, ask some volunteers to share what they learned about their partners.

For groups with shy or introverted members, you can extract the highlights from the group discussion. After the discussion, ask your teammates to submit one interesting fact they learned.