A cohesive team relies on meaningful interactions as fuel for collaboration and productivity. While this is easy to do in person, it can be more difficult when team members are geographically dispersed.

Fortunately, technology has given us a host of tools that can help bridge the gap, chief among them being Slack. You can take advantage of its features and integrations to create a team environment that is both productive and fun. We’ve rounded up some creative Slack team building ideas you can use.

1. Celebrate birthdays

One of the best ways to build a strong team is to celebrate together. Celebrating your distant colleagues on the most important days of their lives is a great way to do this.

You can create a specific channel (group) on Slack and add an app called BirthdayBot to track birthdays and anniversaries. BirthdayBot will automatically remind team members of someone’s birthday or work anniversary, so you can all send a happy birthday or anniversary message.

You can also customize this Slack app to your liking, setting reminder levels or allowing team members who prefer to keep their birthdays private to opt out.

2. Recognize team accomplishments

Team success is a collective effort, and it’s important to recognize the accomplishments of your team as a whole. This makes your team feel appreciated and motivates them to work harder, while enhancing the remote work experience.

You can use Slack to congratulate team members on their wins by adding Discoa cultural platform that tracks and promotes daily employee celebrations.

Disco lets you publicly congratulate team members on their professional achievements, share kudos, offer rewards, and more, right in your Slack workspace. This helps create a culture of appreciation that boosts team morale.

3. Create and Enjoy Collaborative Playlists

Music is a great way to motivate people and inspire productivity, and it can also be a fun team building activity. You can enjoy collaborative playlists with colleagues using Jukebot in your Slack workspace if you already have a Spotify account.

Once you have created your collaborative playlist on Spotify, add Jukebot to your Slack workspace. This will allow team members to add and remove songs from the playlist without leaving Slack.

You can also use it to search for new songs by name or artist, shuffle tracks in your playlist, or find out who added a specific track to the playlist.

4. Add games to your workspace

Playing games with your team remotely can relieve boredom and stress and strengthen team bonds. Although Slack is widely known as a communication tool, it can facilitate friendly competition and lighthearted fun with its game integrations.

There’s a long list of games you can add to your Slack workspace, including Tic-Tac-Toe, Code namesand chess bot. These games can spice up your workday, help team members get to know each other better, and build trust.

5. Set up interest-based channels

Creating interest-based channels on Slack allows team members to share their passions and interests with each other. This can help build relationships and encourage collaboration.

Here are some ideas for interest-based channels:

• Reading Club: A channel where team members can discuss the books they read and recommend new titles to each other.
• Cooking club: A channel where team members can share recipes, cooking tips and photos of dishes.
• Gaming club: Where colleagues can get together to discuss their favorite video games and share gaming tips.
• Cine-club: A channel where team members can discuss their favorite movies, recommend new movies to watch, and share movie trailers.

6. Gather around the water cooler

This is where you recreate the desktop water cooler experience you used to have in person. It’s a place where team members can chat and catch up on non-work related topics of the day.

Some things you can discuss in your water cooler channel include:

• Latest news headlines.
• Recent sporting events.
• Favorite Netflix shows.
• Funny memes; Basically, any non-work-related chat that can help team members bond and relax.

Creating a virtual water cooler at your remote workplace can help strengthen relationships and improve workplace morale. You can add an app called donut to automatically pair colleagues for virtual coffees or peer learning opportunities, and connect new hires with onboarding buddies, to name a few.

7. Take a home office tour

Slack has a video call feature or Zoom integration that you probably use for team meetings. You can break the monotony of your weekly meetings by hosting a home office tour for the first five minutes.

It’s a great way for team members to get to know each other better and see where everyone is working. Your meeting can start with a quick tour of the home office for the person scheduled to visit that day. They can show team members their desk, office supplies, pictures on the wall, and anything unique to their workspace.

You can reward the team member with the most organized or unique office setup to make it more engaging. It can be an Amazon gift card or a free lunch.

8. Play Two Truths and a Lie

It’s the perfect team building game to play with your remote co-workers in a Slack video call because it helps you get to know each other better. In this game, team members take turns sharing three statements about themselves, two of which are true and one of which is false.

The other team members must then try to guess which statement is the lie. This game is a fun way to find out more about your colleagues. you can find out their favorite foods, where they grew up, what they are afraid of and other interesting facts about their lives. This can be a fun activity for your next virtual coffee break on Slack.

Boost your team’s productivity with these Slack team building ideas

These are just a few of the many team building activities you can do with your remote colleagues using Slack. These activities can help build stronger relationships, improve workplace morale and productivity.

You can use it as inspiration to create your own Slack team building activities.

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