Your best performers are avoiding the 3 pm icebreaker session because they fear it will ultimately hurt their performance. The employee who’s in bed halfway across the globe at that time feels left out. And that introvert would rather not tell you that if they could choose any superpower, it would be an indestructible digestive system. (On the spot, they’ll just tell you they’d like to fly.)
The answer? Async, remote team-building activities. Without meetings, without Zoom, and never on a schedule.
TL;DR
- Async team-building ideas protect focus time and respect all work situations.
- Employee recognition can be a springboard for meeting-less, low-cost rituals.
- Informal team-building that doesn’t feel like team-building attracts silent workers and introverts.
Why remote and hybrid teams need async team building
Async team-building might be the only option for async teams. But it’s also a great candidate for teams with substantial overlap in their working hours, even those who collaborate in real-time daily.
Protects focus and deep work.
People engage with work they feel has a purpose. They know it matters and has value to the company. If their most important working hours can repeatedly be interrupted for Zoom trivia, it whittles away at this belief.
Async team-building protects the most critical “getting it done” blocks of everyone’s day.
Considers those with different work arrangements.
People in NYC and LA can link up live with little trouble. Toss in a teammate from London, and another from Adelaide, and suddenly we have people on the outside looking in. That’s the reason we design async processes. However, every shared zone is still full of caregivers, part-timers, and busy people who are just mentally done by late afternoon.
Activities that are ready when they are available resemble the actual flexibility and inclusion they were promised.
| 🌎 Earn tacos toward the team-building reward of their choice. If async employees are looking to link up in real-time, let them pick a popular team experience. |
Ideal for introverts and declining participation.
Your last 12 team-building ideas haven’t been a hit. The same three people are keeping the whole program afloat. Consider low participation feedback and start making optional activities more accessible and easier to say yes to.
Introvert-friendly work cultures have taught us a lot about what it is that really turns people off. It’s the feeling of having to compete for visibility or perform for one particular moment.
5 Low-cost, zero-meeting async team-building ideas
Not that new to hunting async engagement games for work? You already know about Wordle and weekly prompts. Some of these ideas won’t even be recognizable as organized team-building. A few seem like interesting add-ons to routine work.
If you already use HeyTaco, they’re more than low-cost; they’re totally free.
1. Sprint Anthem Playlist
Big push coming up. Open a thread and give everyone a few days to add just one song to be their sprint anthem. Add everyone’s selection to your streaming platform of choice, and share the link to the sprint soundtrack.
You may ask, how does something this small count as a team-building activity? Our brains are seeking tiny cues that signal acceptance every second, all to regulate the nervous system. We feel a sense of community and familiarity even if we (silently) judge our peers’ music taste. It’s all the potential beginning of a longstanding ritual.
2. The Unsung Hero Thread
Awards only hit the mark when they make sense and feel relevant to employees. Peer nominations are a sure thing in that area. They have the additional benefit of preventing less-visible teammates from becoming part of the recognition debt.
Every week, introduce a thread where anyone can nominate an Unsung Hero. This is the person working alone in the furthest time zone. Someone who helps another without being tagged or taking credit in public. The person who documented an issue so thoroughly that someone else was able to search and resolve a similar issue on their own, months later. Post the top picks in general on Friday, so they can get the tacos they otherwise missed out on.
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Try HeyTaco free3. Micro-Mentorship Audio/Video Clips
Mentorship is a traditional, still-effective way to build culture and offer development at once. The problem is that it’ll add another meeting or three to people’s calendars. These relationships also split when workloads grow in scope and take priority.
Two-minute videos explaining any skill are more flexible for mentor and mentee. Busy mentors don’t have to reschedule meetings. Mentees will watch when they’re in a mindset to absorb the information, and can even refer back to it. You don’t need a formal pairing or structured program to do this, either. “Can I pick your brain about...?” turns into a clip posted where anyone can benefit from it.
| 🛠️ Adapt for async. Many familiar, virtual team-building activities are suitable as async engagement games for work. Creating personal shields, writing a story one word at a time, or decoding an emoji message can take five minutes or five days. |
4. What My Algorithm Thinks of Me
Do your coworkers deserve to know that Netflix thinks you’re a conspiracy theorist who would absolutely marry someone you just met?
Instead of starting another watercooler-type channel, or trying to pin down a shared interest among the greatest number of people, laugh at what unites us. And you can start with ridiculous, recommended content. A thread where everyone can post the most confusing screenshots from their FYP is a reminder that being a human is absurd. It’s an easy, covert icebreaker.
5. Tacos of Yore Lore Drop
Retroactive recognition can surface the unanswered code review from March, but it can also be used to celebrate company legends. It brings more recent hires closer to the history and culture of the team. Think of contributions that truly shaped the way things are done now. This is the lore that lives in channels we don’t see on the homepage.
On one team, an employee posted a fainting goat GIF in #random. It was 2019. Someone in marketing loved it so much that it ended up in a pitch deck and exists to this day in branding guidelines. The person who posted it left years ago, but they still get tacograms emailed to them every time the founder recounts this.
Recognition that’s ready when you are.
Strip away all of the fluff, the scheduling, the expectation, the friction. Small habits that people can repeat are what binds teams together, regardless of physical location.
If you’re looking to add remote team-building activities (without meetings), start with better recognition. Sixty-seven percent of people with HeyTaco use it daily. That’s 20-30% higher than other recognition platforms. It’s easier, more informal, and more rewarding than forcing team bonding through traditional point systems.
"I love how HeyTaco helps bring teams together. I've worked with a lot of organizations that want to build strong team support, but my current one is the only one that uses HeyTaco, and I've never been part of a closer team."
- HeyTaco User, Marketing/Advertising
Try it for free and watch it transform connection on your async team in real time.
