- Hey, what's up guys, Pete Moriarty here.
Great to have you here.
This is gonna be pretty fun.
I'm gonna be sharing some of our favorite top games
for remote teams.
And this is all about connecting you and your team
while you're working remotely.
Obviously, COVID has hit,
and we're all in a new reality of working,
and for us, you know, as a team,
as a business, we've been working completely remote,
our whole company, over 40 people now,
from get-go,
well, not quite from get-go,
but let's say for the last five, six years.
So what I've been really interested to share with you
is some of the top games that we play with our team online,
and we've got like a whole library of these,
our HR team,
which we call the Empower Team,
works on these every single week.
So we're gonna be sharing some of our best ones with you,
and we've got some good fun games up our sleeves.
So without further ado,
let's start talking about
what we're going to be talking about today.
And we're talking about our top games for remote teams.
Now, we put a video up,
and we published it on our YouTube back in April
when COVID was happening,
and we were helping businesses sharing some of the ways
that we work remotely as we have been doing
for over six years now.
And the video went absolutely nuts,
just went to our bananas.
And so we decided, okay, well,
let's put together some of our best games.
These are like the top games from our team.
We're not only going to share what the games are,
I'm also actually gonna share what the actual slides are,
and all of the resources for the games as well.
So you can actually literally take these games
and you can use them for your team too.
Now, our business is all about helping small
and medium-sized business owners to grow their business,
get working more productively,
help their teams work more productively as well.
And as I said, we're a remote company.
We've now got more than 40 people in our business.
And everyone works either from home,
from our co-working spaces,
but we're really big believers in flexible working.
And we help businesses enable or become enabled
and empowered,
for them to work remotely with the teams as well.
And so the primary product that we work with
is called Google Workspace,
which is a collaboration platform
and an online business platform,
which lets you get your work and get your business done.
But we also work with other cloud based tools
and technology tools.
We are a technology consultancy,
and that means that we're all about
helping small business owners get the right tech in place,
so you can grow and scale your business
and be successful.
So we have a new reality right now,
and that is that everyone's working from home.
Everyone's completely fatigued on their Zoom calls.
Fortunately, you know,
most people's idea of working remotely
is just working exactly the same way
that you've always worked and firing up Zoom sessions.
So we want to show you guys a different way of working,
and, you know, for us, a different way of working
is doing fun things,
like we had a remote team dress up party.
I think this was for Halloween,
or it might've been for someone's birthday,
but we've got a whole team to dress up
and basically pretend that they were a movie character.
So I can see a Harry Potter there.
I can see the chick from Easy A.
I've got...
I was Romeo from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet.
But you can see there's some pretty inventive costumes there
from the team,
which is pretty awesome.
And these are the kinds of things that we do not just,
you know, for team building, obviously,
but also really to try and foster
and build a feeling of connection
while our team are remote.
Now, we've got a pretty big challenge,
in that, even in pre COVID days,
our team we're working remotely
from all different locations,
and we had to have a feeling connectedness,
and a feeling of closeness with the team,
and, you know, trying to do that across different states,
and across different countries even
can be quite a challenge.
Now, what we do is, at least once a year,
we fly everyone into one city,
and we have a big party,
and we get drunk together,
and spend time together.
But what do you do for the times in between that?
And so some of the strategies that we do,
is we have city meetups, we call them,
where we will have a dinner put on,
company pays for it,
and anyone who's in that city or around that city,
and people will travel hours to hang out
with their colleagues,
will all have a dinner together.
And we try and do those about once a month.
They were a little bit disrupted
by some of the COVID restrictions around travel,
but thankfully we've had them starting out again
in the Philippines,
which is pretty awesome for our team there.
Now, as well as those,
we do a fortnightly kind of hangout call with our team,
which we call TGIT.
Now, that stands for Thank God It's Thursday.
And that's basically a social hangout.
Now, think of that as your equivalent
of like a Friday night drinks with the team,
where everyone just jumps on a hangout,
and we either play games,
sometimes we'll play online games,
sometimes we'll watch a movie together,
sometimes we'll just kind of like goof around.
That's basically our social hangout for the remote team.
So if you don't already
have a regular social hangout scheduled,
or you don't have some kind of like physical
meetups scheduled,
they might be a great place for you to start
with connecting your team while you're working remotely.
There's no science to this.
It's all just about, you know,
trying to collaborate and have your team working in a way
where they feel a little bit more like they're a team
that's together,
rather than a team that is apart.
So I'd like to know,
if you're watching on the live stream right now,
or even if you are in the repeat,
let me know what are some of the things you do right now
to connect your team.
While they've been apart this year,
what are some of the strategies
that you've used to have everyone kind of feeling together?
Because, you know, wherever you are in the world right now,
you're probably doing some kind of remote work right now.
It might even be some kind of remote connection
with your family.
I mean, I know that, for me,
I've spent a lot of time on video calls with my family.
I did virtual games nights with my friends as well,
where we all jumped on a video call,
and we played games together online.
And what I loved about these,
is that feeling of connection,
even though we're in different places.
Now, three years ago,
I moved from Sydney up to the Gold Coast,
and I found a lot of my friends circles ended up changing,
but I still wanted to be connected to my family
and my friends who are mostly down in Sydney.
And I found that,
you know, collaborating and working online,
using the tools that we already have available to us,
our business suite of tools,
I was able to still have a pretty fun time with my friends.
Some of those things we covered in our previous video,
which is available on our YouTube channel,
on the Best Games for Online Teams,
we used things like Jamboard to play Pictionary.
And that's one of Google's great tools
that lets you draw online,
and you can use that on a tablet,
or a phone,
draw pretty pictures,
and collaborate and share that with multiple people.
And one thing that we've done with our team
is when we host TGIT,
or when we host like a party with our team,
we will actually fund snacks.
So we'll give everyone 20 or 30 bucks,
or whatever it is,
so they can grab some beer or grab some pizza,
or get some, you know, Uber Eats delivered to home.
And that means that, you know,
everyone kind feels like the company has shouted them,
just like the business would do
if we were taking a team out to dinner.
So let's jump into some of our top games here.
I want to share with you guys some of the best ones.
I asked my empower team to give us five of their best.
We have sometimes five or six games per fortnight,
every time we do this.
So we picked out some of the best ones for you guys.
And at the bottom of this video,
we will have a link for you to download
and get access to all of the slide decks
with all of the resources for these games.
So you don't even have to make these up yourself.
You can grab these resources and actually go
and play them with your teams.
It was one of the most requested things
from our last video.
So all those resources are gonna be available
in a link below this video.
Let's jump on to game number one.
And this one is called Zoomed In.
So what we're doing here is we're splitting up into teams.
Usually we like to have teams,
because it gives everyone a kind of sense of comradery.
And it's also a good way for people
to get to know their neighbors,
get to know other people they might not usually work with
on a day-to-day basis.
Sometimes with teams,
we will have the teams actually do like a team war cry,
if we've got like a company conference.
And for a couple of weeks leading up to the conference,
we'll actually have the teams work on their war cry,
or work on like a team song,
or something silly like that,
a little bit of fun,
which gives the team an opportunity
to collaborate with each other,
get connected with those
that they might not be working with on a day-to-day basis.
Now, once you've got your teams in place,
then we're gonna be issuing points
to those that are guests or complete objectives correctly.
This game is called Zoomed In,
and it's all about identifying objects in a photo.
And so you can see here, we've got like a super,
super zoomed in image,
and that will be up on a slide,
and the team will have to submit guesses
as to what they think that is,
and we'll just use a Google Meet
to connect everyone for that.
And then you can see this one happens to be paint brushes.
This one looks pretty interesting,
happens to be a rockmelon,
or I think it's called something else
in different parts of the world.
In Aussie, we call it a rockmelon.
So that's the first game there.
We've got a slide deck
with a bunch of different images here.
We can't show them all, obviously,
because we don't want to give them away,
but we've got heaps of options there for you guys
to play with your team.
Game number two,
this one is called Guess the Movie: Emoji Edition.
And I really love this one.
Our team had a heap of fun putting this one together.
And this one's all about
your team's creative thinking skills.
And so again,
you'll have a slideshow,
and you ideally want to have the team split up into teams,
and then you can assign points to the teams.
But basically, you'll have a string of emojis,
and I won't have any words there.
And the team will have to guess what that movie might be
based on the emoji.
So you can see the first one there is Silence of the Lambs.
And then we have the second one there,
Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I remember that I guessed that one correctly
when we did that.
And so it's basically just one string of emojis.
Obviously you won't have the answers there.
And then your team will have to guess what that might be.
And so absolutely love this one.
Gets people's creative brains firing.
Gets them thinking outside of the box.
So our third game is called Around the World.
And this is about guessing the country.
This one pretty simple and straightforward.
We've just got a number of images,
and then your team will need to guess the country.
Really good,
because these are all about kind of like being a quick draw.
And I will share with you a tool
that you can use to actually have a buzz.
So your team can actually do like a buzzer,
rather than just, you know,
firing comments off in the comments.
It makes it a little bit more fun,
and a little bit more competitive.
But again, we just have a slideshow.
It's got a bunch of pictures on there,
and then inside the slideshow, you know,
each time you bring up each one of these,
it's a matter of who buzzes first,
or who puts in the country first,
and then that person becomes a winner,
and they get to collect their points.
Next one,
this one's called guess the logo.
A little bit like guess the country,
but this one is for corporate logos.
So you can see here, we've got a number of different logos
that don't come with any words,
or some of them come with partial letters,
and it's the team's job to choose which brand
or which company they believe they are.
I know two of these out of six,
or three, I could say, I know out of six,
'cause one of them is fairly obvious, I think.
But that one is a pretty awesome,
pretty cool game there.
Now, remember when you're putting together these games
and these presentations,
it's really about fun,
and, you know,
so you want to make sure
that you've got some kind of like side challenges
on the side,
as well as the main goal of earning points.
If you know the difference between intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation,
if everything is always about points and less about fun,
or less about discovery,
or less about learning,
then the team will, at the outset,
first be kind of like motivated,
but then they can become demotivated over time.
And that's because,
intrinsically, wired to be motivated by,
you know, what's inside us.
We're motivated by a sense of mastery.
We're motivated by a sense of purpose.
And so you want to be careful not to go too hardcore
on the points.
Have some fun points,
like, if one of your team members swears,
they lose 10 points.
Or if someone is late to a call or late to a meeting,
then maybe they lose five points.
So throw in some kind of fun ones like that.
You could even have something like, you know,
if someone picks up their glass or their drink,
or their drink bottle with their right hand,
then they lose five points.
So, you know, force everyone to pick up the glass
with their left hand.
They're kind of things that you can do to make it fun,
and make it just that little bit more enjoyable
for the team.
Okay, game number five,
this is called The Deserted Island Scenario,
and this is less of a game,
and more of like kind of a team building activity.
But let me tell you,
this is one of the best ones
that we have done with our team.
And so here, in this scenario,
you want your team to imagine
that they are on a deserted island,
imagine they're on deserted island,
and they have to decide what things
they would want to bring with them on the deserted Island.
Now, you might give them a limit.
You might say, right, you can only bring five things,
or you can only bring 10 things.
But what we do is we actually fire up Google Jamboard,
and so it's just jamboard.google.com.
And you can access that online and create a Jam,
which is like a digital whiteboard
that you can share and collaborate with multiple people.
And we've had like 30, 40 people on one Jamboard.
It doesn't crash. It's totally awesome.
Just like a Google Doc,
you can have is pretty much as many people
on there as you want.
But what our team actually build out
is a Jamboard on what they would take
to the deserted island.
So here's an example that our team brought together.
You can see there,
booze,
glow sticks,
rope.
What on earth would they need glow sticks for?
I guess for you being able to see at night.
That might work.
I would probably take a solar torch or something.
Anyway, map and a compass.
Don't know how they'll phone home.
I think I'd probably go for a satellite phone.
And then we've got another team here.
They brought a boat.
That's probably a good idea (laughs).
Chris Hemsworth, not sure why,
or maybe it was just the surfboard.
But you can see here that the team had got pretty creative.
Now, the idea here is not what they bring.
It's not about earning points.
The idea here is the story
the team tell about what they actually brought along
and why it was important to them,
and most of the team get a pretty good laugh about that
when everyone shares it.
So that's game number five,
that one is called The Desert Island Scenario.
And as I said, we use Jamboard for that.
So that's how we build out that one,
which is a pretty cool.
You just create one Jam,
share it with everyone,
and then everyone can start building that one out.
Now there's one little tool
that I wanted to actually share with you guys.
And it's called BuzzIn.Live.
And BuzzIn.Live,
I'm just gonna open it up now,
and show you guys what it looks like.
BuzzIn.Live is an online system that you can use
for your buzzers.
So you can literally create a little buzzer online,
and then I'm gonna open up the buzzer here,
and everyone will get a big green buzzer.
I think I'm the admin,
so I don't see it on my side here.
But everyone would get a big green buzzer,
and they can click the buzzer when it's their turn to guess.
And this creates like a bit of a race,
like, kind of like a game show,
for everyone to hit the button,
so they can then be the first to be able to guess.
Now what happens is,
it's kind of like a sudden death scenario,
where if the first person guesses it wrong,
then we will pass an opportunity to steal
over to another team.
And what that does,
is it kind of gives everyone the fairness
not to be able to brute force answers
in the games like guess the country,
or guess what the zoomed in thing is.
So you can use BuzzIn.Live.
That's a free tool.
And you can use that for creating your online games,
and getting everyone connected there,
little freebie for you.
Okay.
So if you want to get access to all of these games,
they are inside our private Facebook community.
Now, this is available exclusively
for business owners who are utilizing Google Workspace.
So if that's you,
and you're interested in getting access to these,
we will have the slides.
I will have all the resources for you to get going.
We'll even have the resources like our BuzzIn,
and the links to everything that you need
to get going on these games
inside our group.
So if you want to get access to that,
you can head to this URL now,
itGenius.com/group,
and that will redirect you into the group.
Now, you need to answer a couple of questions
before you're let into the group,
just to double check that you're the right person
for the group.
Because inside there there are other business owners,
and we're talking about Google Workspace,
we're talking about business tools,
and in there we also share other resources,
live videos,
things that you don't get to see in the public,
videos before they go live to the public
will be shared inside that group.
So there's plenty of exclusive content
in there for you to check out.
And of course,
if you're utilizing Google Workspace right now,
it's a great place to hang out with other business owners
who are also utilizing the system as well,
and get additional value.
So I want to say thank you.
And I want to go and encourage you to go set up your team,
meet now with your team,
and get them on the Friday or the Thursday night drinks.
I would love to know from you guys,
what were the number one games for you?
What one are you most interested in rolling out
with your team?
Drop a comment down below.
And if you use any of these games with your team,
I'd love for you to let us know,
send us a message,
drop us a line on any of our social pages,
send us the message,
and say thanks.
Our team would be really, really happy to hear
from you guys.
Now, if you're a business owner
and you're interested in getting support,
or you're interested in a free consultation from our team,
you can head along to itGenius.com,
or you can send us a chat message,
just head along to the chat URL there.
And you can send us a message on our social pages.
Our team are able to help you with technology strategy,
and if you're a small business or, you know,
a growing business,
or maybe you're a large established business,
and you're looking for help
making sure that your strategy is on track,
if you want to make sure that you get the most
out of your investment in Google Workspace,
or if you just want someone to do a bit of an audit
of what you're doing right now,
check if you've got the right CRM,
check if you're, you know,
doing the right thing in the cloud world.
There's so many tools and things available
for small business owners.
As you're on the journey of growth throughout your business,
you'll find that from, time to time,
it's good to get a helping hand
for someone who's been there, done that,
grown and scaled a business,
and created value for our team,
and for our customers as well,
using really great technology tools.
So if that's you,
if you'd like some help,
drop us a line,
and we'll be very happy to help you guys out.
See you next time.