The Guide for Virtual Team Building for Remote & Hybrid Teams

October 6, 2025 | Lynn Reed Insights

Why Remote Team Building is so Challenging?

Developing high-performing teams virtually presents a significant challenge to most managers and leaders.

In the past, building distributed teams (virtual teams) was most often addressed by bringing people together in a central location for several days of “team building”. These events tended to be limited in frequency and the number of participants due to cost and travel time limitations. Remote participants were sometimes told to “dial into a conference call” in order to “include them in the process.” The success of these efforts varied widely, depending largely on the experience of the team leader and the skills of the facilitator/meeting designer.

The pandemic significantly increased the number of employees working remotely, highlighting the necessity to develop an alternative to the “centralized meeting” approach — i.e., virtual team building. It can now engage multiple audiences in different locations more frequently, at lower costs in terms of travel, time, and venue support.

Many managers conduct virtual team meetings as events that are little more than status updates — we call this “show and tell.” People end up bored and disengaged, often after the first hour or two.

Some managers try to interject the session with “fun activities” like games or puzzles. Focusing too much on the fun can result in “eye-rolling” or counterproductive outcomes when other priorities exist.

Bottom line: the term team-building is often overused and misunderstood. Focusing on the right elements of team effectiveness is critical to success. Our experience is based on designing and delivering successful virtual team building processes for multi-national organizations in over 20 countries for the past 30 years.

Why is Team Building Important for Remote Teams?

Remote team members often feel isolated and overwhelmed by the challenges of not sharing physical space with co-workers. According to the Buffer State of Remote Work 2020, loneliness and poor work-life balance are major issues for remote employees. A focus on virtual team building activities helps employees work more effectively as individuals and as team members, thereby building job satisfaction, morale, performance and retention.

Clarify Goals and Team Effectiveness

We recommend engaging team members periodically to assess which elements of team effectiveness may be unclear or lacking impact. Key areas include:

• Mission and goals – what the team is here to do
• Direction – where the team is headed
• Strategy – how it will get there
• Roles – who is responsible for what
• Processes and relationships – how the team will work together
• Success measures – what success looks and feels like, and how to sustain it

Encourage Participation in Virtual Team Building Activities

Once the current state is assessed, design a process that:

• Makes expectations clear
• Gives people time to reflect before engaging
• Encourages participation without forcing it
• Uses techniques like small breakout groups, polling, and checkpoints to stay on track
• Facilitates dialogue in a way that respects different working styles

This ensures participation is meaningful and authentic, not forced, which is especially important in remote and hybrid settings to generate real commitment on the part of team members.

Leverage Personality and Emotional Intelligence Tools

The effective application of personality type preferences and emotional intelligence instruments can add tremendous value to understanding where others are coming from; more importantly, they are key to understanding one’s own preferences (biases) that they bring to the team building process. This understanding can make or break virtual team building, as well as in-person team building processes. Example:

• Some participants engage verbally and quickly.
• Others may seem quiet, reflective, and less engaged — but are actually processing and reflecting deeply before engaging verbally.
• Forcing these “quiet ones” to speak prematurely can backfire, while allowing time and space can foster true engagement.

This principle, drawn from the Myers-Briggs Type Instrument (MBTI), highlights how personality differences impact virtual team building. There is a lot more to it, as well.

Apply Emotional Intelligence for Stronger Results

Emotional intelligence can help, as well. The elements of the EQi-2.0 model that involve self-expression, interpersonal and decision-making aspects of Emotional intelligence can add excellent value when properly taught and applied.

We have developed methods using virtual meeting technologies to make the teaching and application of these instruments highly effective by focusing on interactive exercises utilizing real workplace examples defined by the target client group. Ratings for quality, value and potential impact back at work average 8.5 out of 10. (1 = poor / low; 10 = high / excellent)