Category: General

If you’d gone looking for online team building just a couple of years ago, your options would have been limited. The pandemic has forced a major change in the online landscape in many areas and team activities is certainly one of those. Traditional team building (read “in person”) companies had to adapt to the changed circumstances or go out of business.

Those that survived adapted their in person events to an online setting. Most of those combined webcams of come kind with Zoom to deliver them, with their staff members using the webcams. For example, many companies that provided Escape Rooms pre-pandemic kitted out a facilitator with a camera and allowed their participants to direct their movement and actions within their escape room setting.

And many people enjoyed that – and still are. Which is all well and good if you have a relatively small group size. But there’s a limit to the capacity that such an arrangement can handle. What if your group is 100 people? Many hundreds of people? Or even a thousand or more?

Different

Our approach has always been different. Had you gone looking for online large group team building activities a couple of years ago, you would probably have come across us. We’ve been in this space since 2008 and our options are 100% online. They also have no upper limit on the group size. To date, our largest group sizes have been over 7,000 people. The same set of activities are also suitable for even the smallest of teams. We often have just 3 people tackle one of our options. They are nothing if not flexible!

How?

How do we do this? Our activities are automated – basically we deliver them using technology. Our technological infrastructure is based in the cloud and is autoscaling. It automatically grows to match the requirement that the group size demands.

Flexible

Our clients range from global technological giants with many thousands of people across all functions spread around the world to those who now have people working from home when they used to be in a single office. Did we mention, we’re nothing if not flexible? And home working, whether full time or hybrid in nature, looks set to continue for a large percentage of companies.

And not just for the group size. We’re also flexible when it comes to timing. The shortest time a group has spent with one of our activities is just 15 minute. Yes, we offer great icebreakers for meetings! Yet the longest is over 2 months. Our participants quickly miss us when their event is finally over. You can see for yourself some of our testimonials to see what our clients think of us and our online team activities.

We set our first MiniScavenge scene in a city. “Global City” is styled on New York. It’s cram packed with great opportunities for treasure hunt clues and, like New York, is easy to navigate. Both of these characteristics make it a great choice or first time MiniScavengers. With five other scenes to choose from these days, though, and many returning clients all of our different options provide great variety and greater depth.

Our current newest scene is set in an Amusement Park. And, as you might expect, it’s very popular! People love wandering around the rides, many of which they can actually get on! And it’s a very collaborative scene as well. Even more so than Toon Town, which is also a very popular scene.

So, with a commitment to keep expanding our choice of scenes, where do we go next?

Mars

We’re proud to say that we’ll get there ahead of Elon Musk. It’s in beta test now. And it’s very different to our other scenes. In a number of ways.

Firstly, although there is some outdoors action (with a real Martian backdrop, of course), the majority of the scene is indoors. Within our own Martian Colony.

Secondly, it’s got even more of an escape room feel to it than any of our other scenes. Our colony is modular, with air-tight safety doors connecting the modules. Each of which can only be opened by solving an interesting puzzle. Many of which require team members to collaborate on, as you’d expect from any of our activities.

Thirdly, it’s not set on Earth!

Coming soon

We’ll be adding its details to our MiniScavenge page sometime in the next couple of months. Complete with a 30 second fly-by, of course.

If you fancy a preview, though, just contact us and let us know. We’ll be pleased to show it to you.

We’ve been been offering clients a variety of virtual Christmas party options for many years.  Some have gone fully for a Christmassy theme.  Others, with mixed religion groups, have preferred to focus on a more seasonal winter theme.  Whichever style people have opted for, we know they’ve had great fun!

As we write this, we know it’s only the beginning of October.  Many will find it premature to be discussing Christmas.  The reality is, however, that many teams will start planning now.  Last year, coming under lockdown conditions for many, we had several new clients come to us quite late on.  We were pleased to help, of course, whether they planned it in advance or were quite last minute in their approach.  From our perspective, the same will be true for our virtual Christmas party deliveries in 2021.  We’re ready to help clients new and old have a wonderful, seasonal fun time.

Group size doesn’t matter

Smaller groups can often find it difficult to find something that works for them.  The same is true when people are able to get together in person, of course.  Small team Christmas parties held in person will often take up one or more tables within a wider themed event that is open to various groups.  We’ve done that ourselves.  One year, our team had a blast at a Rat Pack themed Christmas meal and dance similar to this one running in the UK this year.  We took up a few tables with other smallish company groups doing the same.

The year that we went all out for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. we could have chosen a similar event with a different theme, of course.  But whichever we went for, the theme was set, the menu was set and the fun was coming whether we were ready or not.  It was effectively an off-the-shelf offering.  Our Rat Pack was going to sing the same songs every night from the last week of November up until just before Christmas Day come what may.  We could choose the day we wanted and the individual meals off the set menu we wanted, but the main event was already a done deal.  As it turned out, it was a very enjoyable deal at that!

Five options are popular for the rest of the year

In the virtual world, our equivalent for smaller groups is also an off-the-shelf offering.  Our MiniScavange activity has many different themes.  At the time of writing, we have six to choose from.  A seventh is very close to release, but that’s a subject for a future post.  Suffice to say for now that it is our first scene to move off planet!  Anyway, of the other six, there are definite favourites for a group’s first-time visit.  Overall, though, five of them tend to be chosen fairly evenly over the course of a year.

The sixth is a great virtual Christmas party option for smaller groups

The sixth, though, is a different matter.  It’s only ever chosen over a 4 week period that starts in the last week of November.  We call it “Winter Village”.  It’s a Christmas scene.  And boy is it popular at that time!  Winter Village is suitable for any size group, but the majority of clients opting for our Winter Village tend to have group sizes below 100.  It’s like booking a Rat Pack event.  Everything is there just waiting for you when you’re ready to engage with it.

A tailored experience for larger groups

We can provide a tailored virtual Christmas party for any size group.  Because of the extra setup cost, though, it tends to be for larger groups.  Although we have done so for groups of just 50 people, 100 is the more likely minimum.  It becomes eminently financially viable at that point.  And there’s no upper limit.  To date, the largest tailored event we’ve run as a virtual seasonal offering had over 7,000 people.  Anything over 100 people, though, and we’re probably talking about whole departments.  Maybe even whole organizations.

And a tailored experience delivers something special for the participants.  Our events have included “ugly sweater” competitions where everyone gets a vote.  Grand slalom skiing.  Various team-related seasonal fun puzzles involving Santa, elves and – of course – Rudolph with his nose so bright.  All subtly branded to the client organization.  All bringing people together virtually when they can’t physically for logistical or Covid-related reasons.

Of course, we’d be glad to show you what we offer.  There’s no better way than seeing for yourself!  Please feel free to schedule a meeting with us if this is of interest.

Whatever you choose to do this Christmas, we hope you have a wonderful time.

Remote team building wasn’t required when we started back in 1992 – yes, we’ve been around a while!

Back then, we had an office.  A real one.  That everyone worked from.  Every day.  Home working was only really for consultants and other small businesses in the early 1990s.  Global virtual teams didn’t really exist.  If they did, no one told us about them anyway.  So remote team building wasn’t required.  When we worked with geographically spread teams, their members came together and we worked with them in person.

Now, of course, things are very different.  We’re a remote team ourselves.  But we became one before we started to offer remote team building for other such teams.  We don’t need to practice what we preach.  Our online business these days came about more as a way to preach what we were already practising!

From learning and development to in-person team building

We started life as a learning and development company, providing mostly long-term development courses for managers and teams.  Most of these were either for locally based clients or for other locations (including international ones) connected with those clients.  Our Unique Selling Point (USP) in those days was all to do with participant engagement within the courses that we ran.

Our rationale was that it didn’t matter how good the messages were that we were trying to put across to our participants if they were asleep.  We wanted them to enjoy the learning process.  That way, they would far better assimilate the learning on offer.  It’s why, even then, we called the people on our courses “participants”.  Other training providers called theirs either “delegates” or “attendees”.  Ours participated in a two-way process throughout each and every session that we ran.

To facilitate this, at the start we used commercially available experiential exercises to engage people.  They helped us stand out from the crowd, but we felt that there was room for improvement.  So, we started creating our own in-person activities.

Technology keeps our in-person events smooth whatever the group size

Because we could, we created them using technology as a way to deliver them.  And they took on a life of their own.  Our clients loved that they delivered relevant learning and that they got great feedback from the participants.  Clients started to ask us to run them at stand-alone events – company conferences, team away days and the like.  We started to advertise our services for team building.  And that’s when things really took off for us.  Team building became our mainstream business.

Our events became popular both nationally and internationally.  As our business grew, so did the number of people involved in delivering them.  And our people were now spread nationally as well.

We’d become a remote team.

From in-person team building to remote team building

Using technology to deliver great event smoothly and seamlessly – however small or large the group size – we always wanted to make something available online.  For the first few years, though, we were just too busy to do anything about it.

Once we had grown our in-person activity portfolio to a good size, though, we decided to prioritize developing our first online remote team building option – Space Rescue.  It was ready for launch and went live in 2008.  Within a short space of time it took off – please excuse the pun!  At a time that budget was at a premium (thanks for the financial crisis), a professional team building activity that didn’t require geographically spread team members to come together to tackle a challenging and learning-focused remote team building activity was of great interest to many organizations.  Initially, we were running sessions for teams of fewer than 10 people.  But quickly that grew and soon our largest group size was in a little over 1,200 people.

Now our largest group size is in excess of 7,000 people.  The great thing about using technology as the delivery mechanism is that it is infinitely scalable.  We have no doubt that we’ll be running for even larger groups at some point in the not-too-distant future.

All because we are a remote team ourselves?

All?  No.  But a significant part certainly is.  In expanding our portfolio we were able to call upon our own direct experience of being a remote team.  But we also used various outside sources such as this Harvard Business Review article titled Getting Virtual Teams Right.  Even today, new research and articles that focus on newly formed remote teams thanks to Covid-19 such as this shown on a BBC site is essential reading for us.

We may already preach what we practice, but we want to improve our own remote team’s happiness and effectiveness as much as we want to continue to help our clients’ remote teams.

After much consideration, we have decided to begin an online team building activities blog.  It’s only taken us 13 years to make this decision.  Clearly, we don’t like to be rushed!

So, why start now?  It’s a bit of a long story…

Pre-pandemic – how it used to be

Until the pandemic hit, we were the only game in town when it came to professional online team building activities designed for remote teams.  That fact came with an upside and a downside for us.

The upside was, simply put, if someone was looking for an activity for a team that wasn’t co-located they were likely to choose us.  If they could find us, that is.  Which is where the downside came in.  No one really knew that online team building activities existed.  So most didn’t think to search online for them.  And if you don’t look, you don’t find.  And many didn’t.  The good news for us, though, was that those that did search tended to be working within large enterprises with correspondingly large remote teams.

Lockdown

Perhaps understandably, when the pandemic took hold more people started to look.  As much as we’d rather it was for a different reason, the practical upshot was that our business blossomed.  We might not have had a blog going then, but we added a rare article to our site.  It aimed to help people understand how we could help in the changed circumstances everyone found themselves in.

Everyone was in the same boat. Everywhere, people were in lockdown.  Suddenly, everyone was searching working from home and searching online to find a way to bring people together and have some fun. Some relief from the pandemic.  And many were finding us.

Existing clients such as Apple moved key in-person events online, adding a team activity to the proceedings to ensure everyone was engaged.  New clients such as Dawn Foods and Talkdesk discovered that people didn’t need to get together to have fun.

Online team building activities are adapted from in-person options

What happened next is interesting.  In order to survive, many “traditional” team-building companies took their offering online.  They adapted to the changed circumstances.  Almost all of them did this by using Zoom.  Escape rooms are a prime example of the type of team building activity that has moved online.  Some have made the transition better than others, but none were designed for remote teams.

Our activities remain, to the very best of our knowledge, the only online team building activities designed from the outset for remote teams.  To quote one new client, other activities are just like having a normal Zoom session.  Ours, she thought, was a proper activity!

The world has changed

Now the world has changed.  Everyone knows that team building can be achieved online.  And they continue to search online for it as a result.  And the interest is much wider now.

Pre-pandemic our clients’ teams were generally quite widely spread – many, of course, globally spread.  Now a large number have teams that used to be co-located within an office that are now working from home.  Or some are working from home, at least, as many businesses turn to hybrid working patterns.

Enter our online team building activities blog

We may still call ourselves Global Team Building, but we’re delivering great events with local teams as well now.  And we have a lot of great content to interest groups of all sizes wherever their team members are located.  And a blog seems to us to be the best way of doing just that.

So do please keep an eye out for new blog posts from now on.  We’ll try to educate and entertain in equal measure.  And also try to convey the sense of enjoyment and appreciation that our participants feel when they take part in one of our events.