A cohesive team relies on meaningful interactions as fuel for collaboration and productivity. While that’s easy to achieve in person, it can be more of a challenge when team members are spread out geographically.

Fortunately, technology has given us a host of tools that can help bridge the distance, chief among them being Slack. You can leverage its features and integrations to create a team environment that’s both productive and fun. We’ve put together some creative Slack team-building ideas you can use.

1. Celebrate Birthdays

A birthday card, flowers, a pen, and a birthday gift.

One of the best ways to build a strong team is to celebrate together. Celebrating your remote colleagues on the most important days of their lives is a great way to do that.

You can create a specific channel (group) on Slack and add an app called BirthdayBot to track birthdays and anniversaries. BirthdayBot will automatically remind team members when someone’s birthday or work anniversary is coming up, so you can all send a happy birthday or anniversary message.

You can also customize this Slack app to your taste, configuring reminder levels or allowing team members who prefer to keep their birthdays private to opt-out.

2. Recognize Team Achievements

Team success is a collective effort, and it’s important to recognize your team’s accomplishments as a whole. Doing so makes your team feel appreciated and motivates them to work harder, while improving the remote workplace experience.

You can use Slack to congratulate team members on their work wins by adding Disco, a culture platform that tracks and promotes daily employee celebration.

Disco allows you to publicly congratulate team members on their work achievements, share kudos, give rewards, and more, right in your Slack workspace. This helps create a culture of appreciation that builds strong team morale.

3. Create and Enjoy Collaborative Playlists

A woman enjoying music through her headphones.

Music is a great way to get people pumped up and inspire productivity, and it can also be a fun team-building activity. You can enjoy collaborative playlists with colleagues using Jukebot in your Slack workspace if you already have a Spotify account.

Once you have made your collaborative playlist on Spotify, add Jukebot to your Slack workspace. This will allow team members to add and remove songs from the playlist without leaving Slack.

You can also use it to search for new songs by name or artist, shuffle tracks in your playlist, or find out who added a specific track to the playlist.

4. Add Games to Your Workspace

Playing games with your remote team can relieve boredom and stress, and boost team bonding. Although Slack is widely known as a communication tool, it can facilitate friendly competition and light-hearted fun through its gaming integrations.

There is an extensive list of games that you can add to your Slack workspace, including Tic-Tac-Toe, Code Names, and ChessBot. These games can spice up your workday, help team members get to know each other better, and build trust.

5. Set Up Interest-Based Channels

A stack of books

Creating interest-based channels on Slack allow team members to share their passions and interests with each other. This can help to build rapport and encourage collaboration.

Some ideas for interest-based channels include:

  • Book Club: A channel where team members can discuss the books they’re reading and recommend new titles to each other.
  • Cooking club: A channel where team members can share recipes, cooking tips, and food photos.
  • Game club: Where colleagues can come together to discuss their favorite video games and share gaming tips.
  • Movie club: A channel where team members can discuss their favorite movies, recommend new films to watch, and share movie trailers.

6. Gather Around the Water Cooler

This is where you recreate the office water cooler experience you used to have in person. It’s a place for team members to chat and catch up on the non-work-related topics of the day.

Some things you can chat about in your water cooler channel include:

  • The latest news headlines.
  • Recent sporting events.
  • Favorite Netflix shows.
  • Funny memes; basically, any non-work-related discussions that can help team members bond and relax.

Creating a virtual water cooler in your remote workplace can help build stronger relationships and improve workplace morale. You can add an app called Donut to automatically pair up colleagues for virtual coffees or peer learning opportunities, and connect new hires with onboarding buddies, to name a few.

7. Have a Home Office Tour

Home office setup

Slack has a video call feature or Zoom integration that you probably use for team meetings. You can break the monotony of your weekly meetings by organizing a home office tour during the first five minutes.

This is an excellent way for team members to get to know each other better and see where everyone works. Your meeting can start with a quick tour of the home office for the person who is scheduled to do the tour that day. They can show team members their desk, office supplies, pictures on the wall, and anything unique to their workspace.

You can reward the team member with the most organized or unique office setup to make it more engaging. This can be an Amazon gift card or a free lunch.

8. Play Two Truths and a Lie

This is the perfect team-building game to play with your remote colleagues during a Slack video call, as it helps you get to know each other better. In this game, team members take turns sharing three statements about themselves—two of which are true and one of which is false.

The other team members then have to try and guess which statement is the lie. This game is a fun way to learn more about your colleagues; you can discover their favorite foods, where they grew up, what they are scared of, and other interesting facts about their lives. This can be a fun activity for your next virtual coffee break on Slack.

Boost Your Team’s Productivity With These Slack Team-Building Ideas

These are just a few of the many team-building activities you can do with your remote colleagues using Slack. These activities can help to build stronger relationships, improve workplace morale and productivity.

You can use this as inspiration to come up with your own Slack team-building activities.