Редакція dev.ua Around IT 30 January 2025, 10:00

How to strengthen team spirit when teammates are thousands of kilometers apart? Experience of Englishdom, EPAM, Levi9, ZONE3000, Railsware and DataArt

How to unite a team that works mostly remotely is extremely rare? Over the past 5 years, employers have had to change the paradigm of teambuilding, adapting corporate events to the challenges of the time. Nowadays, to feel the team spirit, it is not necessary to rent a facility or prepare a mega-event at your own location. It is enough to competently approach the organization of employees' leisure time online.

dev.ua, in a partner material with Englishdom, talks about the most common options for holding online team meetings and the experience of the most successful online events in Ukrainian IT companies.

How to conduct online team building in 2025

The Englishdom team has created an extensive guide for HR professionals, presenting 12 scenarios for conducting effective remote team building events, as 86% of employees and managers cite lack of cooperation or ineffective communication as the cause of failure in the workplace.

Icebreakers. Suitable for getting to know each other, finding common topics, especially for teams where people don’t know each other well. This format helps to overcome initial wariness and start communication in the team. They create a favorable atmosphere for an open exchange of ideas and establishing contacts, which is important for building trusting relationships.

Examples:

Online lunches. This practice involves pairing your team so that once a week, everyone can have lunch with a new colleague. You can use GPT Chat to help you pair up without repeating yourself.
«One Lie, Two Truths» is an activity that can be used as part of a larger meeting. Each participant must state three facts about themselves, one of which is false, and the others must guess which fact is a lie.
Personal Coat of Arms — This activity will also help you talk and understand each other better. Invite everyone on the team to draw their own coat of arms that reflects their interests, values, or achievements, and then present it.

Games provide an opportunity to relax and have fun together, experience the spirit of competition, identify leaders and build cross-team relationships. Games contribute to the development of team cohesion and improve employee morale. They also help create a relaxed atmosphere, which positively affects mutual understanding and cooperation.

Examples:

Pictionary is a game with a host, during which, using a random word generator in English or Ukrainian, the host generates a word to explain it to others without using cognates. For example, if you have a team of movie fans, the host will tell the plot of a given movie, and the others will guess the name.
Skribbl.io allows you to create a private room for the game, where colleagues can join via a link. The program will invite everyone in turn to draw an explanation for a random word, which the other participants must guess. The game is not available in Ukrainian, but is available in English.
«Can you hear me now?». In an online meeting, you choose one person to be the «presenter,» and everyone else will be the «artists.» The «presenter» chooses a random image and describes it so that the «artists» can draw it. The trick is that you can only use the names of geometric shapes. For example, «Draw a large, slightly elongated circle, and another small one in the middle of it» instead of «draw the letter O.» To make it easier to find images, you should use an image generator.

Online workshops will allow you to spend time together with benefit. To do this, you can invite a professional in a certain field to teach you or involve colleagues in skill sharing with others.

Examples:

Culinary master class. Choose an interesting dish and cook together online with warm conversations. Share your style of cutting vegetables, secrets of boiling perfect spaghetti, and then arrange a competition among the presentation of the finished dish.
Art competition. If there is a budget, the company sends employees a canvas, three colors of acrylic paint, and a brush in advance. If there is no budget, everyone can buy them themselves or use existing materials. During the meeting, give the task of drawing an association to the word «summer», «shyness» or «long and blue object». Then make a collective screenshot of the works and hold a vote for the best drawing.
Skill Sharing. This format involves inviting colleagues to share their own experience and unique skills. Maybe someone knows the best methods for Life Management or builds graphs and tables like a Pro — try teaming up and organizing meetings where everyone can teach their colleagues, strengthening their authority and opening up from new angles.

Hobby clubs help build stronger team bonds and develop communication and creativity. Hobby clubs help build deeper personal connections between employees, allow them to discover and develop creative skills, and regularly support relaxed communication, which strengthens team spirit and prevents conflicts.

Examples:

Movie/Book club. Great options for regular meetings that help not only have fun spending time with the team, but also teach you to analyze works, look at familiar things (plots) from a new angle, and (why not) «steal like an artist» new ideas for business.
Yoga/Training time — such meetings are a great way to bring people together, even when they are not physically together. In general, a sports club allows employees to develop healthy habits together and support each other.
Talent Show. Announce the talent show to the team in advance, invite the jury, and give them a few months to prepare the performance — a fun and unconventional team building activity is ready! This will definitely bring the team together in the best way.

Activities in English bring people together, allow them to improve their English communication in a relaxed atmosphere, and preserve the resources of organizers and participants.

Examples:

Brainstorming in English is a good option if your team speaks English well but is still shy about speaking. During such a brainstorming session, you can make mistakes and mix up words, but the main thing is to talk in a simulated working atmosphere.
Group sessions-lessons according to the business program — if the business has a request for both team building and English.
Closed speaking clubs for improving communication business cases. This class focuses on professional speaking. Together with an experienced mentor, your employees will work on negotiations, speeches, communication with clients, and other cases.

Englishdom is convinced that English-language online activities are the most beneficial for IT professionals, eliminating the language barrier and training communication skills. And here we are ready to help you learn English in this form.

Last year, the company held a Halloween Team-building event on Zoom, where experts described their costumes, guessed each other’s childhood dreams, and then worked in teams to create interactive puzzles to maintain team spirit. At the end of the event, a «Halloween Quiz» was held among Englishdom employees. The event lasted 1.5 hours and was designed for 15-20 people. Its result was increased team cohesion, easy and fun communication in two languages in the team, and the creation of a positive atmosphere thanks to game and creative tasks.

How teams are united in Ukrainian IT

Some of the practices described above are already actively used in Ukrainian IT. dev.ua asked leading IT employers to tell us about their most interesting and effective teambuildings. There are many examples.

Levi9

The company held a technical pub quiz, which we initially developed for an internal game, and later this fun grew into a special project, where anyone can test their IT knowledge by answering various thematic questions. They also practice a sports challenge twice a year. «It’s not only about activity, but also about charity: for every kilometer of running, walking or riding, a donation of 10 UAH is made. The total amount goes to funds that support the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. The challenge is supplemented by lectures on nutrition, running techniques, yoga training and even mindfulness practices,» the company said. Such activities, Levi9 assures, show that online is not limiting if there are values that unite the team.

EPAM Ukraine

For organizing online teambuilding events, EPAM has a separate unit that will either offer a ready-made solution or develop a new one based on a completed brief regarding the purpose of the event.

The solutions are systematized according to Bruce Tuckman’s group dynamics model (Formation, Conflict, Norm, Execution). The number of participants in online team building can vary from 6 to 250 participants. The goal can be different — from «melting the ice» and uniting the team before starting project work to reflections after the project is completed, or just having fun and switching. This can be a one-time meeting or a cycle of events. We use licensed versions of the ZOOM, MS Teams, Kahoot and Mentimeter, Genially platforms for conducting.

Among the customized solutions that have received positive reviews are «Gartic Phone» (participants take turns guessing words based on their description or picture), «Strangers» (get to know each other better based on questions like «What did you want to be when you were a child?» or «What’s the first thing you do after waking up,» etc.), and associative cards.

The best and longest team building event last year was an intellectual and entertaining tournament at the request of one of the teams. It consisted of a series of games once a month, each time exploring different topics — Ukraine, the world, cinema. The goal was to motivate and raise the team spirit of colleagues.

«We used the Mentimeter, Kahoot, and Zoom platforms. The long format is perceived better, because the participants have expectations, it is already a certain tradition for them. We tried to structure the questions in such a way as to make it impossible to use AI. The teams rallied and searched for answers through brainstorming. We always monitor the success of team building based on feedback. This time, colleagues were interested in whether there would be a continuation,» Viktoriya Didukh, head of the EPAM Ukraine event department, told dev.ua. In total, last year the company held 5 such tournaments, each time involving teams from 40 to 120 people.

ZONE3000

«This year, like previous ones, we did not organize loud corporate parties to celebrate the New Year, but this does not mean that we did not gather for friendly gatherings. For our specialists, we held a Christmas quiz with additional activities, which we developed individually for the teams, taking into account their wishes,» notes Oleksandra Dovga, HR Business Partner of ZONE3000.

She gave an example of such activity. Most teams at ZONE3000 work remotely, so the goal was to create a warm atmosphere even online, as if colleagues had met for mulled wine or sat together at the same table. The theme of the quiz was the traditions and attributes of Ukrainian Christmas, because it is truly filled with a large number of original things. World traditions that have already become classics were also included. «For example, we learned that it was in Germany that they first started using Christmas trees to decorate rooms, decorating them with sweets, fruits, and candles,» says Oleksandra.

Joint activities added to the atmosphere of unity. For example, in one of the teams, the experts prepared New Year’s salads. «We asked the 'chefs' (each participant became them) to prepare the ingredients in advance, the list of which we sent in advance. Jokes like 'rice by eye' or 'have you seen the price of eggs, where are they so many?' added to the sincere and light atmosphere,» the expert recalls. After the 'culinary exercises', the experts enjoyed tasting the dishes they had prepared themselves, discussing the traditions and customs of Christmas in the families of their teammates.

DataArt

In recent years, the company has been giving preference to the online format of teambuilding at the corporate level. While thinking about various ideas for conducting online teambuilding, the company wondered whether music could unite specialists. And they decided to test this using the example of the internal project Radio DataArt. It began as a local initiative for Ukrainian colleagues with the aim of uniting specialists working in different regions of Ukraine and beyond. «Just imagine a real radio broadcast: Ukrainian music, greetings and interactives that create a sense of unity in the team. The project quickly gained popularity among Ukrainian colleagues and formed a community of connoisseurs. We soon realized that it could be scaled up to the entire company and unite colleagues from different countries,» the company told dev.ua.

The first large-scale radio broadcast took place in honor of the company’s 26th anniversary. Here they prepared

special jingles to promote the company’s services, created a playlist with hits from various

locations and invited a colleague from Odessa to be the host. The broadcast was conducted from the Odessa office with the support of an external contractor. The specialists had the opportunity to convey congratulations to their projects and colleagues, hear their favorite music, and take part in an interactive quiz dedicated to DataArt’s birthday.

«This became a new format at the company level, and we received a lot of positive feedback. Today, we continue to develop Radio DataArt and use it to celebrate important events, such as the company’s anniversary on July 4th and the Holiday Season. Radio has become not only a platform for interaction and engagement of employees from all locations, but also a platform for transmitting news about the company and its services,» DataArt said.

In December, before the broadcast for the winter holidays, a competition was organized here for the best

AI-generated song. It received an impressive response and added to the airwaves

unique tracks. Over 400 listeners joined the radio broadcast, which confirms its popularity and relevance. The project remains «low-budget», which allows the company to use resources effectively.

Railsware

Railsware has been remote-friendly since the early 2010s. Therefore, over more than 10 years of «hybrid» experience, many formats of online activities have been tested here.

A recent vivid example of such a format is a radio show with a guest DJ. «More than two-thirds of the team joined the two-hour live broadcast. Together we listened to our favorite music, ordered tracks, took part in interactive quizzes, guessed familiar songs from the 1980s and 1990s, and discussed all this in the chat. Moreover, it was partly an offline format, because among the listeners were also our offices, where we ordered pizza for a more driving atmosphere. This radio Friday turned out to be truly special: many colleagues said that it felt like everyone had gathered offline,» Daryna Kuzmyk, Talent&Culture Lead Railsware, told dev.ua.

However, according to her, it is important to keep in touch with people not only at special moments, but also on a regular basis. The tradition of random coffee helps teammates with this — a special application gathers random groups of colleagues every week to meet for virtual coffee. «It is important that these calls are not about work, but rather about non-work: life, hobbies, news, travel, etc. „Random“ brings together colleagues from different countries and teams, thanks to which even in our 200+ team, colleagues know each other. Such meetings allow both juniors and C-level specialists to relax and get to know each other better, creating a space for relaxed communication,» says Daryna.

Instead of a conclusion

The examples above show that remote international corporate events are an effective tool for uniting international teams in large and small companies. Games, workshops, celebrations or even just a joint coffee online help specialists feel part of the team and communicate without feeling lonely if you work from home. However, in international teams, it is also crucial to use a language that is understandable to specialists from different locations — usually English. This approach, when everyone understands everyone, helps create a feeling that the team is together, even if there are hundreds of kilometers between teammates.

Want to learn how learning English can bring your team together?

Book a free consultation from Englishdom and learn how to adapt training programs to your needs!