The offices are empty, and everyone is working from home. While some positives have come about from this brave new world, one of the bigger drawbacks has been the struggle to maintain a sense of camaraderie at work.
Pre-pandemic, team-building days and group lunches were some great ways to build and strengthen the bonds essential to a productive workgroup. These outings also helped to develop communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills, all of which positively impact work performance.
For over a year, we’ve gone online to connect with friends, work, and learn, and it’s resulted in Zoom fatigue. You’ve done the online games, virtual happy hours, and mixology classes. Although those have been great, you really don’t want to ask everyone to get on Zoom again.
So, what’s a manager to do to build morale and have fun with their team while keeping everybody safely apart?
Bring everyone together with a little competition for a good cause with an online A-thon. Your virtual team-building activity can be done asynchronously, indoors or out, does not require Zoom or Slack, and is easy to put together!
Here’s how:
Choose a charity as a team or pick one of your company’s preferred causes. Then, organize your activity using an event fundraising platform. With Eventgroove, each employee or team can create their own fundraising page. There, friends and family can pledge an amount per mile, hour, or any other measurement you choose. Team member pages are automatically connected to your organization’s main fundraising page, which can be branded completely to your company.
Up the ante by getting other teams or departments to participate in the A-thon. There could be a Marketing vs. Finance or an Operations v. IT smackdown. Or take the whole thing company-wide and come up with a really great prize (like a week of vacation!) and do a bracket system where each team works to meet a fundraising goal. Whoever makes their goal the fastest wins and moves on to the next matchup until one team is ultimately victorious.
Stir up the friendly competition by adding team leaderboards to your main fundraising page! Offer a prize for the person who raises the most, each time a fundraising milestone is met, and when the fundraising goal is met.
In addition to updating progress on their own fundraising pages, you can encourage employees to post pictures on social media with a fundraising-specific hashtag. That way, their colleagues can see what they saw on their daily walk, bike, or hike!
A few A-thon ideas to get the virtual team-building ball rolling:
Walk-A-Thon (at home):
Everyone’s happy to get out, so why not make their daily constitutional count? You could plan this A-thon to take place over the course of a week, and supporters could pledge by the mile.
Read-A-Thon:
Encourage relaxing with a book with this low-key fundraiser. Make every chapter count by setting the pledge at pages read and extend the A-thon time to a month so people have a chance to sit down with a book.
Bike-A-Thon:
Inspire team members to explore new parks and paths! Set the pledge by the time spent peddling and incentivize getting out of the neighborhood by tacking on bonus points that translate to a company-match donation when they take the road less traveled.
About Eventgroove: We make it easy to start, promote, and run online events and fundraisers branded to your organization. Our mobile-friendly platform is integrated for video streaming, equipped with powerful analytics features, and packed with tools to make promoting events through email outreach, SMS, and social sharing easy. Plus, we offer custom branded print products to support your efforts. To learn more, visit us at Eventgroove.
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