Creating a place where people love to work and collaborate can be challenging in a fast growing startup. A constant high number of new joiners and a remote-first work culture are not the best circumstances for team building activities in startups. Luckily, there are still many opportunities to connect your remote team members without meeting in person.

Here are five creative ideas for remote team building events for startups.

1. One-Day Hackathon

Organise a one-day hackathon with your team to automate tasks or build low-code products.

If you want to bring your team together, enhance cross-functional collaboration, and increase your startup's efficiency at the same time, this is the must do event. To get this started you need to set up teams of 2-3 people. It’s important that the team has mixed technical skill levels to ensure that everyone can build a product or automate processes. There are also many no-code tools available (e.g. n8n, Webflow, Airtable, MailChimp etc.) which make it possible to run the event for non-developers. In preparation, it is advisable to organise team meetings in advance to give everyone time to decide what to build or which processes to automate. There are many options, like building a dashboard to automatically track your KPIs or automating your customer onboarding processes. You can find some ideas for workflows here.

As for the schedule, you can divide the day into five sections:

1. Welcome and icebreaker

2. Hacking Part I

3. Virtual team lunch

4. Hacking Part II

5. Presentation, celebration, and drinks.

Group size: teams of 2-3, no limit for the number of teams

Duration: whole day

Best for: dev focused teams, cross-functional collaboration, mixed technical skill levels

2. Art night

Your office walls could use some color or you just want to take some time out and get creative? Then this will be the perfect team event for you.

You could use the art night to paint a collage for your office, where every team member creates one piece of the picture. Even if it takes a bit of effort to draw the first lines, it is an excellent activity to get everyone out of their stressful everyday life and have a lot of fun together. It’s even nicer when you all listen to the same music and have a tasty drink while painting. It is amazing to see how the event can strengthen your team affiliation!

If you want someone to organise the event and guide your painting session, you should find a local art teacher or school to run the session, ideally one which can also provide paint and materials to the team.

Group size: no limit

Duration: 2-3 hours

Best for: team affiliation, creativity, relaxing

3. Among Us

30 min coffee chats, Thursday after-work or after your next lunch break? Honestly, there is always time for a quick round of Among Us.

If you haven’t heard about it, don’t worry you will learn it easily. You can play the game with up to 10 people. The game takes place on a spaceship where all crew members need to complete different tasks. Unfortunately, up to 3 team members are Impostors that sabotage and kill crew mates. The goal of the crew is to identify the Impostor(s); the goal of the Impostor(s) is to kill everyone before completing their tasks. Prep for this quick team event is pretty simple: You only need a video meeting and the Among Us app on your smartphone. I swear your team will love this.

Group size: 3-10

Duration: 15 min

Best for: taking a break from a long day, new teams, fun

4. Fitness activities

With so many of us working from home, it can be difficult to get motivated to get up and get moving. Why not take the opportunity to boost the team spirit and work out together?

This will not only be really beneficial for everyone's physical and mental health, but also bond your team. There are many activities you can do together, like yoga or HIT (high intensity training). In any case, it should be something that everyone would enjoy. You can make a poll where team members can vote for their favourite activity. If you don’t have a sporty volunteer in your team, it’s a great idea to ask a professional trainer for a private online session.

Group size: no limit

Duration: 60 min

Best for: active teams, mental break

5. Escape Room

Another online game but so much different! You probably know about Escape Rooms: Those sometimes more or less spooky rooms where you need to team up and solve different riddles to escape the room get out.

The team’s goal is to solve all riddles in a predetermined time. Though this game is commonly played offline at a real location, there are also online versions, just as exciting. Working together under time pressure will make it a lasting experience for everyone, so this is the perfect opportunity to improve your team collaboration skills and have a lot of fun together.

Group size: no limit

Duration: 60 min

Best for: problem solving, team bonding, collaboration

Out of all these fun ideas, our team is most excited about the automation hackathon. If you want to learn more about how we run it and how to organise a remote one for your team, feel free to contact us on Twitter or email. If you have any questions about n8n, drop by our forum 🧡.