I planned corporate events for 15 years before remote work became the default for a huge swath of the workforce. And I’ll be honest: when the world shifted in 2020, I watched a lot of well-intentioned team building for remote teams land completely flat.
Trivia nights via Zoom. Virtual escape rooms with laggy video. Online cooking classes where someone couldn’t get their ingredients delivered. These efforts were sincere, but they were often designed by copying in-person formats and hoping the medium didn’t matter.
It matters. A lot.
The teams that figured out team building for remote teams first were the ones who stopped trying to replicate office experiences online and started designing specifically for what distributed teams actually need.
Here’s what I’ve learned — both from planning virtual events myself and from watching what creates real connection versus what just fills calendar time.
Why Remote Team Building Is Different (and Harder)
In-person events solve connection problems almost automatically. You’re physically together. You can’t avoid eye contact. Side conversations happen naturally. The seating arrangement at dinner is its own team-building mechanism.
Remote teams don’t get any of that for free. Every moment of connection has to be intentionally designed.
The specific challenges:
Proximity bias is real. Remote employees often feel peripheral — both socially and professionally. Team building for distributed groups needs to actively counteract this, not passively assume everyone feels included.
Zoom fatigue is real. Adding another video call to a remote employee’s calendar, even a “fun” one, starts from a deficit. The activity has to overcome the medium before it can create genuine engagement.
Home environments vary. Some participants have a quiet home office. Others have kids, pets, small apartments, or unreliable Wi-Fi. Great remote team building accounts for this variation.
Time zones complicate everything. A truly distributed team may span 12+ time zones. “Let’s do something after work” has no single answer.
What Actually Works: Principles First
Before I get into specific formats, here are the principles that consistently separate effective team building for remote teams from calendar filler:
| Principle | What It Means in Practice |
|---|---|
| Genuine shared task | Something to DO together, not just watch or listen to |
| Low tech floor | Accessible on any connection, no special equipment |
| Voluntary contribution | Structured enough for introverts, open enough for extroverts |
| Asynchronous option where possible | Time-zone-friendly activities reduce exclusion |
| Physical element when possible | Something shipped to homes makes it real |
That last point — the physical element — is underrated. When people have an actual object in front of them (a wine kit, a cocktail box, a recipe kit), the experience stops being “another video call” and becomes something tangible. The shared object creates shared context.
The Best Team Building Formats for Remote Teams
1. Virtual Blind Wine Tasting
This is my favorite format for team building for remote teams, and it’s what The Wine Voyage specializes in. Here’s how it works:
Wine kits (typically 4–6 mini bottles or curated selections) ship directly to participants’ homes before the event. On the event day, everyone opens their identical package and the tasting session begins via video — typically 60–90 minutes.
Participants taste blind, discuss in small breakout groups, make team guesses about what they’re tasting, and then learn the answers together with wine education woven in.
What makes this work so well for remote teams:
- It’s inherently conversational. You have to discuss with your group to form a consensus guess. The structure requires interaction, not just passive watching.
- Everyone starts equal. The CEO and the new hire have the same glass of wine. Hierarchy dissolves.
- It creates genuine disagreement. People have different palates. “I taste raspberry” vs. “I definitely taste plum” is a real debate that produces real laughter and real memory.
- It works across demographics. Wine curious doesn’t require wine expertise. Beginners often beat “wine people” in blind tastings.
I’ve watched remote teams who’ve worked together for two years discover things about their colleagues they never knew — and I’ve watched those discoveries become the reference points that make Slack messages warmer for months afterward.
2. Virtual Cocktail or Spirit Tasting Kits
Same concept applied to cocktails, tequila, mezcal, or whiskey. Kits ship ahead. The event walks participants through guided tasting with a professional host facilitating discussion and education.
Spirits tasting kits are particularly popular with teams that have wine-fatigued attendees — the novelty of comparing two expressions of mezcal or three bourbons creates fresh curiosity.
For team building for remote teams that spans multiple office locations, these kit-based formats are especially strong because everyone has the exact same product regardless of where they’re dialing in from.
3. Async Team Challenges
Not everything needs to be synchronous. Well-designed async challenges can build connection across time zones without requiring anyone to show up at 6am or 11pm.
Examples that work:
- Weekly photo challenges with a theme (best view from your home office, favorite local coffee shop, etc.) shared in Slack with voting
- Team cookbook compilations where each person contributes a recipe with a story, assembled into a shareable document
- Trivia or quiz tournaments run over multiple days rather than a single session
These formats allow everyone to participate meaningfully on their own schedule. They also tend to produce artifacts — the cookbook, the photo gallery — that outlast the event and continue generating connection.
4. Online Learning Together
Joint learning experiences create surprising connection, especially when the topic is genuinely new to most participants.
Structured options that work well for team building for remote teams:
- A wine education module with a short quiz and discussion afterward
- A masterclass-style presentation on a regional cuisine or cultural tradition, followed by breakout discussion
- A collaborative “research project” where small teams each learn about one aspect of a topic and present back
The key is structure. An unstructured “learning session” becomes a lecture. A learning session with team roles, mini-challenges, and a presentation component creates active participation.
5. Virtual Game-Based Formats
Purpose-built remote game platforms (Jackbox, Kahoot, Drawasaurus, Among Us) have improved significantly since 2020. When well-facilitated, they’re genuinely fun for an hour.
What to know: game-based formats work best for teams that already have some social cohesion. For new teams or teams with significant relationship gaps, games can feel forced if people don’t yet feel safe enough to be playful. A tasting or learning experience often builds that safety first.
6. “Coffee Roulette” and Informal Pairing Programs
One of the most effective ongoing formats for team building for remote teams is also one of the simplest: random 1:1 pairing for 20-minute video coffees on a rotating basis.
Tools like Donut (Slack integration) automate this completely. Teams that run this consistently report stronger cross-functional relationships than teams that run quarterly events but have no informal connection infrastructure.
This isn’t an event — it’s a system. And for large or rapidly growing remote teams, systematic informal connection often beats episodic events.
Planning a Remote Team Building Event: Step-by-Step
Define the Goal First
Are you trying to:
- Onboard a new team member cohort?
- Repair relationships after a difficult quarter?
- Celebrate a team win?
- Bridge two teams that merged and don’t know each other?
The goal shapes the format. Celebration calls for something playful. Onboarding calls for something that encourages people to share about themselves. Bridging calls for something with genuine shared challenge.
Logistics Checklist for Kit-Based Events
If you’re doing a tasting experience with shipped materials:
- Confirm shipping addresses 3+ weeks out — some participants may have moved, have PO boxes, or need alternate delivery locations
- Check alcohol shipping restrictions by state (several states restrict direct-to-consumer alcohol shipping)
- Plan for 1–2 non-drinkers — quality non-alcoholic substitutes or mocktail kits should ship alongside the main kit
- Send a pre-event email explaining what to expect and what time to open their package
Technology Setup
- Test your breakout room structure before the event
- Assign a co-host to manage technical issues while you facilitate content
- Have a backup plan for participants who lose connection
- Record the session (with consent) for participants who had to miss
Right-Size the Group
| Group Size | Recommended Format |
|---|---|
| 5–15 | Single-room tasting, intimate discussion |
| 15–50 | Main session + structured breakout rooms (4–6 people each) |
| 50–100 | Multiple parallel sessions or large-group with heavy breakout use |
| 100+ | Broadcast format with smaller-team breakouts and async components |
Breakout rooms are the unlock for larger virtual events. A group of 80 cannot have a real conversation in a single Zoom call. Eight rooms of 10 people can.
Common Mistakes in Remote Team Building
Choosing the longest option. Remote attention is harder to sustain than in-person. A 90-minute well-designed experience outperforms a half-day event almost always. Build in breaks if you go longer.
Skipping the icebreaker. Even for teams that know each other, a 3-minute structured opener (current city weather + one word describing your week) grounds people in the room before you ask them to engage more deeply.
Not preparing facilitators. Remote facilitation is a distinct skill. The person who’s great at running in-person workshops may flounder on video if they haven’t adapted their approach. Invest in facilitator preparation or hire someone who does this regularly.
Measuring success by attendance. A fully-attended event where people checked out mentally isn’t success. Measure by post-event survey sentiment, whether people reference the event later, and whether you observe any changes in informal communication.
Making Remote Work Feel Less Remote
The teams that do team building for remote teams best have internalized something important: connection isn’t a quarterly event. It’s an ongoing infrastructure investment.
Events like a virtual blind tasting create peaks of connection — memorable, shareable moments that give teams reference points and inside jokes. But the infrastructure between those peaks — the coffee roulette, the async challenges, the informal Slack channels — is what sustains connection week to week.
Design both layers, and the gap between your distributed team and your in-person counterparts gets narrower than most people think is possible.
At The Wine Voyage, we run virtual tasting events specifically designed for remote and hybrid corporate teams. Our Virtual Blind Tasting format ships directly to your team’s homes and turns a standard video call into a genuine sensory experience that people actually look forward to. We’ve run sessions for fully distributed teams across 10+ time zones and for hybrid teams where half the group is in an office and half is at home.
For more on team building that works across different contexts, see team building ideas for work, virtual team building ideas, and how to plan a team building event — including planning timelines, budget guidance, and vendor selection tips.
Further Reading
For research-backed perspectives on remote team dynamics and distributed work, I recommend Harvard Business Review’s remote work research for evidence on what drives connection in distributed teams, and SHRM’s remote work resources for HR best practices on employee engagement in distributed environments.
