Virtual Team Bonding: A Redbooth User Story

We’ve discussed the difficulty of virtual team bonding or team building the past. But how do you really get your colleagues/team members to bond over thousands of miles and dozens of computer screens? What are the team bonding games or activities that really work?

Enter Horse & Cart Agency. Changing their name meant some big changes for the company. New processes. New team members. And a change in the culture too.

One Friday afternoon, Brendan Sera-Shriar (one of the founders) decided to create a project called “Random”. It was filled with silly little tasks like “ask X if he got new shoes”, chugging flat soda, or announcing during their morning scrum that their turtle had died. Basically, harmless practical jokes, and anyone in the project could create a new task.

He stated that there are only three rules in Project Random: you must have at least two witnesses, you can’t task the group with anything dangerous or harmful, and you can’t resolve a task that you created.

The team reports that what usually happens is that one person will perform the task, they’ll all have a laugh about it and then move on with their day. It’s a friendly punctuation during the day and the work week. They’ve even upped the ante by making it a competition. The person with the most completed random tasks at the end of the month will win a prize.

We like that the company has found a way to keep the team together on a cultural level even though they work with lots of freelancers and contractors, meaning the size of the team fluctuates quite a bit depending on the projects du jour. Often there is a playful race to get the task done as soon as the team gets a notification about it, but only if it doesn’t seriously interrupt the workflow. For Horse & Cart Agency, Project Random has been a fun little activity that reflects the company’s nature and helps them retain their fun-loving work culture as they continue to expand.

Would you adopt Project Random? Or what are some atypical uses your team have discovered for Redbooth? How do you organize virtual team bonding in your team? We want to know!