Team building is crucial for remote teams. But it takes time to get it right. We found and rated 13 software tools, apps, and mobile games that lighten the load.
Julian Schaaf
Head Of Marketing
I lead the 100% remote marketing team and write about our team building experiences.
Julian Schaaf
Head Of Marketing
I lead the 100% remote marketing team and write about our team building experiences.
Gomada is a digital assistant that helps you build an excellent remote team. Gomada does this by doing three things:
1. Shows you where to focus your time
Especially when you manage a remote team, it’s tough to know how everyone is feeling. Gomada’s Pulse Surveys will show you where you’ve got work to do and where the team is in good shape.
Gomada's dashboard shows key metrics for your team
2. Gives you a step-by-step activity plan to improve
In the past, we used Google to find activities for improving our team. Gomada already knows what your team needs, recommends an activity based on that, and lets you run a polished, engaging session with the click of a button.
Here’s what a session with your team could look like:
3. Removes scheduling and organization It’s quite straightforward: If team building is a time-suck, no one will make time for it. At least not more than once a quarter.
With Gomada’s scheduling functionalities (in development), you can do regular team building that drives results with less than 5 minutes of setup, organization, and scheduling a month.
Gatheround (not to be confused with Gather Town) helps remote and hybrid teams build better work cultures. The tool “makes it simple to bring your team together in a way that’s both wildly fun and deeply meaningful.”
Gatheround offers two core features:
Schedule: Set a cadence for how often you want to meet with your team
Gather: Use templates to plan your gathering and meet in a virtual space
We tested Gatheround with the Gomada crew and, competition aside, can’t say a bad thing about their approach to team building.
Similar to Gatheround, Thursday promises to build your remote team culture. The Thursday approach, however, is slightly different.
The tool offers a virtual meeting space similar to Wonder. To connect the team, Thursday offers a collection of “Mixers”, light and engaging activities you can play remotely. You can help different departments connect with their randomizing functionality within Mixers.
5. Dive deep into team preferences with Rising Team
Price: $79 per team per month (includes ten users)
Rating: n/a
If you prefer an online-learning approach to team building with 90-minute deep dives every six weeks, consider using Rising Team.
Rising Team offers course materials to learn about team building and measures and stores team skills and preferences. As opposed to other software listed here, Rising Team doesn’t offer a virtual meeting room - instead, teams meet on Zoom, Google Meet, or Veertly while running their sessions.
One of the downsides of playing online games with your team is that you can’t talk to each other while you’re playing.
Veertly is one of the most customizable virtual platforms that lets you embed pretty much anything: Games, whiteboards, and networking tools, to name a few.
This allows you to have a video meeting next to your embedded game or tool. The screen is just split between the two without losing functionality.
Smash Karts is one of our favorite games to embed for a team building session on Veertly. Watch the video to see some of the gameplay:
Getting to know people from other departments pretty much died with remote work. It’s tough to break out of your silo.
In my last job, we used Donut’s Slack app to randomly pair two employees weekly (each person can choose their cadence). The pair can then find a time to meet and get to know each other.
Donut follows up with each pair to ask how their meeting went and gives the company a weekly update on Donut introductions made.
If you’re pretty comfortable with your team and don’t mind joking about NSFW topics, Evil Apples will be right up your alley.
Inspired by Cards Against Humanity, players fill in the blank to complete absurd sentences. The player that picked the sentence chooses their favorite answer, earning the player who wrote the answer points.
But the points aren’t what matters - the crazy answers and resulting sentences make this game fun.
There’s no better way to describe Among Us, one of the most successful games of 2022, than using the developers’ own words:
"A game of teamwork and betrayal ...in space! Play online with 4-15 players as you attempt to prep your spaceship for departure, but beware as one or more random players among the Crew are Impostors bent on killing everyone.”
To get a better feel for the game, watch what a round of Among Us looks like:
League of Legends has been around for ages and is played by up to eight million people at the same time.
The multiplayer game is now available on your mobile device with similar gameplay to the PC version.
If your team is into gaming or wants to try something completely new, give LoL a try. Be prepared to spend too much time playing this game in the future (speaking from our own experience).
Another team building tool to consider: Pop-up offices
One of our favorite team building tool at Gomada is pop-up offices. It’s what we call our twice-a-year team retreats.
We’re a fully remote company and learned that team building is a marathon, not a sprint. Regular training is more efficient than quarterly or even less frequent “sprints”. We invest in team building weekly with virtual sessions or working with team building companies 2-3 times per year.
BUT we also know virtual activities can’t replace that meeting in person. So twice a year, we bring the entire team together somewhere in Europe. We spend an entire week working on big ideas, going on hikes, and just hanging out together.
It’s a big effort to plan, and it’s not cheap. But heck, we rate it 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕.
End the year on a high note: Three new activities are coming to Gomada
November, December, and January are peak crunch times, leaving little time for meaningful connections. To help your team stay connected, we are releasing three new activities: Holiday Spirit, Memorable Moments, and One-on-ones.
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