Explore Virtual Team Building Activities

Discover the benefits of virtual team building activities, from enhancing cohesion and sociability to building skills applicable in the workplace. Learn about the variety of events available, from trivia nights and escape rooms to professional development courses and cooking classes, all designed to cater to your team's needs while ensuring their comfort at home.

Key Insights

Virtual team-building activities can range from simple, fun activities to professional development programs, all intended to foster a more sociable and cohesive work environment.
Hosting a virtual team-building activity demonstrates your appreciation for your team's contributions and your commitment to creating a more enjoyable and productive work environment.
Virtual team-building activities can help employees develop skills they can utilize in the office, such as teamwork and creative thinking.
CourseHorse simplifies the process of organizing a virtual team-building activity by handling all logistics, from setting up the digital space to arranging facilitators for the event.
The virtual delivery method of these events offers several advantages, such as ease of scheduling and the convenience of allowing participants to join from their own homes.
CourseHorse offers a wide variety of professional development courses, such as training in specific applications like Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office Suite, as well as soft skills and stress management training.

Virtual team building activities refer to a wide range of fun and productive activities you can organize for your team or employees in a virtual meeting room. This can include professional development activities like online training courses or fun activities that can help your team socialize with each other or serve as a reward for their hard work and dedication. Regardless of your reason for hosting a virtual team building activity, many different options are available to meet your goals and work towards building a more cohesive and sociable working environment without making your employees leave their homes.

Reasons to Host a Virtual Team Building Activity

Hosting a virtual team building activity shows your employees or team members that you value their contributions and want to create a more pleasant and productive working environment. This can take the form of an after-work activity, like a trivia night or cooking class, or a more skills-oriented course that aims to help team members become more knowledgeable and skilled employees.

If you aim to reward your employees, make them feel more appreciated, or just provide them with an opportunity to socialize, virtual team building activities can be designed with these goals in mind. The added structure of a set of games, a small class or a collection of ice-breaker activities can really help your team members open up to each other. These courses can also help generate interest and attendance, as opposed to more traditional team building activities and activities, which may seem intimidating or simply not something an employee wants to do. Plus, these activities can just be simple fun, which makes them a great way to introduce employees to one another or build long-term relationships between your employees. This also makes celebration activities feel far more rewarding to your employees since these activities are things that they will actually enjoy doing as part of a celebration.

On a more practical level, virtual team building activities can also be used to help your employees build skills they can bring back with them to the office. This can take the form of directed skills training, like a course teaching your team of web designers how to better use applications like Figma, or it can take the form of helping your employees build transferable skills, like learning how to think in creative, lateral ways while completing a virtual escape room. These kinds of activities can pay long-term dividends as your employees blend sociable activities with skills training. Plus, even if the skills don’t immediately apply to your workplace, having your employees work together as a team and become more cohesive can still pay off in the long run.

Advantages of Virtual Team Building Activities

Virtual team building activities have several advantages over standard, in-person team building activities, especially if scheduled and organized through CourseHorse. Virtual team building activities are easy to run and schedule, can be organized to include all of the necessary materials and ingredients provided directly to participants, are easier to build interest in and are more convenient for the participants.

CourseHorse takes almost all of the guesswork and logistics out of planning a virtual team building activity. Their professional activity organizers will help you build the activity of your choosing, and they will take care of all of the back-end planning, including setting up the digital space, arranging facilitators for the activity and shaping the activity to meet your needs. Suppose the activity requires materials, like a food or art class. In that case, CourseHorse will send your participants a package containing the necessary materials, saving everyone the hassle (they will send vouchers to participants in activities requiring perishable goods like milk and eggs or alcohol, like the spirits in a cocktail course).

In terms of the virtual delivery method, choosing an online team building activity has several advantages. Most notably, it makes scheduling and organizing the activity much easier since all of your participants are free to attend the activity from the comfort of their own homes. This will help increase attendance and buy-in from your team since it will remove one more barrier to attendance. In addition, these activities can be more easily tailored to the needs of your team members since they aren’t limited to what is available to be done on-site or within your area. As a minor but important bonus, these activities are also very easy to schedule since you aren’t competing with other parties or limited by physical space, making them ideal for activities planning to host a large audience.

Kinds of Virtual Team Building Activities

Virtual team building activities come in all shapes and sizes, meaning that no matter what you are looking for, there will always be an option that suits your needs. Some options offered by CourseHorse include elaborate, multi-faceted games and activities, while others are more laid-back social gatherings structured around a shared activity. There are also many classes and training sessions to choose from if you want to provide your employees with a place to build personal or professional skills. Whether you want to host a virtual trivia night, teach your employees how to make the perfect mint julep or get them hands-on experience with data analytics tools, you’ll be able to find a virtual team building activity that is perfect for your needs.

Virtual Trivia

In terms of fun, easy-to-organize, sociable activities, bar trivia is incredibly popular. However, there are many reasons you may be hesitant to organize a bar trivia outing for your team. Travel can be difficult, venues can only host so many people, it can be expensive, and some team members might be hesitant to go to an unfamiliar bar and be surrounded by strangers. Virtual trivia activities solve all of these problems by making your team members the sole participants and letting attendees participate from their homes. These activities can also be structured for up to 200 attendees, meaning that no matter how large your team is, CourseHorse can handle the logistics of running the trivia activity.

In a Virtual Trivia Activity, attendees will be divided into teams and asked general knowledge trivia questions. Most CourseHorse trivia activities take place over four rounds, each with a different theme to the questions, including a traditional round, a music round, an image round, and a surprise round, but this can be customized to fit your preferences. During the planning phase of the activity, you’ll be able to discuss questions, categories and information with your facilitators, and you can even include custom questions based on your team's interests or history together. These virtual team activities are a good way to build social bonds between your team members and to give them a fun way to socialize at the end of a long work week. They are also good ways to get your team members working together on a common task as they learn more about each others’ interests and knowledge bases.

If you are interested in a more specific kind of trivia activity, CourseHorse offers a range of themed trivia activities to choose from. This includes popular culture trivia nights, such as music, movie and sports trivia, or focused activities like Reality TV trivia or even something as specific as Seinfeld or The Office trivia. Other trivia activities include focused topics like Natural History Trivia or World Cuisine Trivia, and CourseHorse also hosts socially conscious trivia activities for activities like Black History Month trivia, Women’s History Month trivia, or Pride Month trivia. Any of these options or offerings can be mixed and matched together to create the ideal evening of virtual trivia for your team.

Virtual Escape Room Activities

If you are looking for a more elaborate activity or activity, you may want to consider a virtual escape room. Many teams are beginning to use local escape rooms to host fun, engaging team building activities that reward and encourage teamwork and lateral thinking skills as participants need to work together to solve puzzles and escape the room. However, escape rooms have a number of limitations as team building activities. They are bound to specific locations, so you may not want to have many of your employees commuting to random malls or suburbs, and they have a strict maximum capacity, sometimes as low as eight. Finally, if they are especially popular, you may find them booked for a while since only one team can use an escape room at a time.

Virtual escape rooms address almost all of the logistical issues of participating in an escape room since they are run in private digital spaces and can be run at any time. CourseHorse can schedule activities for as many as 200 participants, and they will break off into smaller groups to run the same escape room simultaneously. These activities are run by experienced facilitators who are more than capable of managing large teams and ensuring everyone has an enjoyable experience. While each escape room is different, in all of the rooms, participants can expect to spend about an hour solving puzzles, collecting clues and unraveling a mystery. All of the activities are heavily thematic and atmospheric, and since there are so many different options available, you can bring your team back for more activities if they enjoy their first round in the virtual escape room.

There are a wide variety of different virtual escape room options to choose from. You can choose to have CourseHorse facilitators run a Virtual Murder Mystery where teams solve puzzles to track down a murderer before they strike again. There is also a wilderness survival-themed Arctic Circle escape room and a Sci-Fi-themed The Final Frontier escape room. CourseHorse also offers more light-hearted escape rooms, including nostalgia-filed Escape the 90s and Escape the 2000s activities and popular culture-themed activities like a Marvel Avengers or a Jumanji-themed room. Finally, there is a range of activities for Holiday escape rooms, including a Haunted House and an Office Christmas Party escape room. This is only a small sample of the dozens of escape room options available to book through CourseHorse.

Virtual Art Team Building Activities

Another popular option for virtual team activities is an art class or community art experience. In these activities, participants will come together and create impressive artistic creations that they can use to decorate their homes and offices. This can be a relaxing and stress-relieving activity that brings people together to socialize as they work on their projects. These activities are low-stakes chances for participants to flex their creativity and make something tactile that they can keep with them for years to come. In addition, since these activities aren’t competitive, participants may find it easier to focus on their work and the socializing happening during the activity.

Art classes are a great way to let participants unwind and express their creativity in an environment encouraging them to let loose and experiment. These courses are all taught by experienced art instructors who are ready and trained to help bring out the best in your participants' work, even in a digital space. These courses usually run for about two hours and can be supplemented with a wide variety of different activities, including icebreaker games to help get participants into a sociable mood and ready to start creating. CourseHorse ensures that everyone is prepared to participate in these activities and will ship packages containing all of the necessary materials directly to participants' homes, meaning all they need to do is show up ready to make art.

There are various art classes to choose from, and these activities range from simple and accessible to elaborate (but still beginner-friendly). For example, the Virtual Paint & Sip Party will see participants creating a simple oil painting on a pre-sketched canvas while enjoying an evening of drinking and socializing. CourseHorse will even let you customize the image that is on the provided canvases and can ship wine to participants to make the activity even easier. CourseHorse also regularly runs Watercolor Workshops and Acrylic Painting Workshops for organizers looking for a slightly more involved painting activity. There is a very popular Virtual Hand Clay Building activity that will see participants making molded bowls out of air-drying clay and a Virtual Candle Making activity in which participants will make scented candles. One of CourseHorse’s most popular activities is their Virtual Terrarium Building Workshop, which involves artists working with rocks, succulents and mosses to create living works of art in glass terrariums that they can expand upon or display.

Virtual Cooking Team Building Activities

If you are looking for a home class that is more immediately practical than an art class, CourseHorse offers a wide range of home cooking activities, during which an experienced chef will guide your participants through the steps of creating a delicious home meal, dessert or drink. These are very popular activities since participants won’t simply be making something they can enjoy at the moment, but they will be learning the practical skills to replicate the recipe and add it to their own rotation. Participants often enjoy spending time with others, particularly those they work closely with, creating something from scratch, and a cooking activity is an ideal way to get this done.

Cooking classes work very well in a virtual environment for several reasons. The most notable is that participants can cook from the comfort and familiarity of their own kitchens, making the process less intimidating and hassle (since they know where everything is and how it all works). In addition, since there is no transport involved in finishing the food, participants can start enjoying their meals, desserts or drinks right away. Finally, working in a virtual space makes it easier for participants to substitute elements of the recipe, either for taste reasons or dietary restrictions. Finally, CourseHorse makes things extra easy on participants by sending them packages containing all the necessary dry ingredients for all the activity’s recipes and a list of wet ingredients (or spirits) and a gift certificate to round out the pantry and ensure that everyone has what they need to start cooking.

CourseHorse offers seminars for cooking meals and desserts and mixing cocktails (sometimes alongside a meal or dessert). For dinner, you can have your team make Handmade Pasta, Sushi, or an entire Pizza from Scratch. All of these experiences come with all of the necessary ingredients to make a delicious entree that can be paired with any number of sides and accouterments. There are a variety of seasonal and year-round dessert classes offered, including things like an Apple Pie Workshop, a Donut Workshop or a Candy Making Workshop featuring Truffles and Brittle, among options for seasonal favorites like a Pumpkin Pie Workshop (which can be taken all year round). If you are looking for a treat in the vein of a Happy Hour, you can sign your team up for a Virtual Mixology Workshop, where you will learn the art of mixing cocktails at home. You can select from a rotating list of drinks to prepare, or you can sign up for a seasonal course, like the Winter Mixology, Springtime Mixology or Pride Month Mixology courses.

Virtual Game Night

CourseHorse also offers a collection of virtual game nights that can serve as team building activities, fun social activities or icebreakers for new teams. These activities are a great way to bring co-workers together for an evening of fun, and they are endlessly customizable to suit your teams’ needs. All of the activities are overseen by experienced CourseHorse facilitators, who have the experience and training to get your participants into the right mood for the games. They will also run the games to allow you to participate without worrying about handing over the reins to someone without experience running these kinds of games. These sessions tend to last between thirty minutes to an hour, though the specific make-up of your game night can be customized to suit the needs of your team.

If you are looking for a first activity for your team members to get to know one another, consider the Virtual Icebreaker: Getting to Know Your Teammates activity. This collection of games is a great way to get new colleagues to socialize with one another and learn more about each other and themselves. This will allow team members to engage in small groups and as part of a large team, giving them ample opportunities to meet and engage with everyone on the call. If you are looking for a more involved game, you may want to consider a Virtual Scavenger Hunt. In these games, participants will work in teams to solve riddles and puzzles to “decode” a list of prompts they need to respond to (by finding things around their homes). This is a good way for smaller groups to get to know each other as they work together to find and explain personal possessions and other household items.

Looking for a game that will help build practical communication skills? You should schedule a Virtual Brick Building Team Challenge. In this game, participants will receive a collection of LEGO® bricks and play various minigames that involve building structures and communicating instructions to partners and teams. These challenges include creative challenges to build scenes and portraits out of bricks and more detailed-oriented challenges tasking participants with guiding one another through complicated building projects. You may also want to consider the Virtual Team Olympics, which blends together all of CourseHorse’s most popular game activities into a team-driven evening of light-hearted fun. These activities are easy to customize, and you can add games to virtually any class or activity that CourseHorse offers.

Virtual Professional Development Courses

While they may seem less immediately exciting, virtual activities can be a good way to provide your team with essential skills training or training in important transferable skills like communication and conflict management. In these courses, participants can skip the hassle of complex onsite training exercises and seminars by attending from their homes. They can also attend if they are remote workers and need training on using a tool or application in their home office. These programs are great ways to improve workplace productivity and to help your employees become more robust and effective members of their respective teams.

If you are looking for specific skills training, CourseHorse offers a robust collection of tech and design training programs. You can provide training in applications like Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro or any other Adobe Creative Cloud application. In addition, you can offer corporate training in applications like the Microsoft Office suite or specific applications like Excel. In addition to training in specific applications, CourseHorse also offers corporate training seminars for skills like Graphic Design, Google Ads, Python for Data Science and Financial Modeling, all of which are skills that can make your employees better workers and your business more profitable.

In addition to focused training in applications or tech skills, CourseHorse also offers a range of classes designed to provide training in soft skills and stress management skills. You can provide your employees with communication training in the Virtual Public Speaking Through Stand Up course or the Virtual Team Building Improv Workshop. These courses provide attendees with a creative and enjoyable way to perform in front of others and build confidence in their abilities to speak and communicate. They also can help make your employees more confident in expressing their ideas in group meetings or brainstorming sessions. If you are interested in helping your team de-stress, you can schedule a Virtual Weekly Decompression for High Stress Teams seminar. This program will provide your team members with a virtual space to unwind and learn techniques for creating a better work-life balance and managing the stress of their lives and professions. The schedule and frequency of these decompression sessions can be customized to fit the specific makeup of your team and workload.

Scheduling a Virtual Team Building Activity with CourseHorse

If you are interested in scheduling a team building session of any kind, you should contact CourseHorse to speak to a trained representative who can help you get started with the process. You can either easily schedule one of CourseHorse’s many pre-planned team building activities or speak with an activity coordinator to start customizing your perfect virtual team seminar. CourseHorse offers the option to customize almost any element of your activity for a small fee, and planners and facilitators can work with you to get the most out of any activity. Once you have a final list of participants, CourseHorse will take care of all of the logistics of shipping our packages of supplies, setting up the digital space and sending out invitations, reminders and other communications to the guest list.

Virtual Team Building Activities

Virtual Private Trivia

Virtual Wine & Cheese Workshop

Virtual Feud Frenzy

Virtual Escape Room: Murder Mystery

Virtual Terrarium Workshop

Virtual Clay Hand Building

Virtual Game Show Bingo

Virtual Escape Room: The '90s

Virtual Brick Building Team Challenge

Virtual Mixology Workshop

Virtual Scavenger Hunt

Virtual Escape Room: Expedition to the North Pole

Virtual Terrarium Workshop

Virtual Clay Hand Building

Virtual Paint & Sip Party

Virtual Art & Meditation

Virtual Watercolor Workshop

Virtual Brick Building Team Challenge

Virtual Candle Making

Virtual Grow Your Own Home Garden

Virtual Marbled Resin Cutting Board

Virtual Mosaic Tray Workshop

Virtual Watercolor Workshop

Virtual Workshop: Moss Wall Art

Virtual Pizza from Scratch

Virtual Mochi Ice Cream Making

Virtual New York Style Pretzels

Virtual Truffle Making Workshop

Virtual Hummus Making

Virtual Mixology Workshop

Virtual Ice Cream Making Workshop

Virtual Gnocchi Making

Virtual Hot Sauce from Scratch

Virtual Sushi Making Workshop

Virtual Bread Making: Focaccia Art Workshop

Virtual Escape Room: The '90s

Virtual Escape Room: Murder Mystery

Virtual Escape Room: The Office Holiday Party

Virtual Escape Room: Pirate Treasure Hunt

Virtual Escape Room: Expedition to the North Pole

Virtual Escape Room: The Arctic Circle

Virtual Escape Room: Escape from the '70s

Virtual Escape Room: Murder Mystery (45 minutes)

Virtual Escape Room: Escape from the '80s

Virtual Escape Room: The Final Frontier

Virtual Escape Room: Marvel Avengers

Virtual Escape Room: Monsters & Ghouls

Virtual Private Trivia

Virtual Trivia: Timewarp

Virtual Trivia: Black History Month

Virtual Trivia: Music

Virtual Trivia: Movies

Virtual Trivia: Cuisine

Virtual Trivia: Friends

Virtual Trivia: Nerdy

Virtual Trivia: Pride Month

Virtual Trivia: True Crime

Virtual Icebreaker: Get to Know Your Teammates

Virtual Googling History

Virtual Escape Room: Murder Mystery

Virtual Brick Building Team Challenge

Virtual Icebreaker: Get to Know Your Teammates

Virtual Game Show Bingo

Virtual Mini Game Showdown

Virtual Pictionary

Virtual Team Olympics

Virtual Scavenger Hunt

Virtual Private Trivia

Virtual Feud Frenzy

Virtual Escape Room: The '90s

Virtual Escape Room: Expedition to the North Pole

Virtual Wine & Cheese Workshop

Virtual Mixology Workshop

Virtual Chocolate Tasting

Virtual Wine Tasting Workshop

Virtual Mixology Workshop

Virtual Belgian Beer Tasting

Virtual Tasting: Olive Oil & Balsamic Vinegar

Virtual American Whiskey Tasting