Back when I still worked for someone else — this was pre-COVID — "remote team building" wasn't really a thing. Why the hell would you pile into a Zoom call when you could just go grab a drink together for real? Then the world went remote, the corporate entertainment market changed completely, I saw an opportunity, and decided to build a startup out of it.

Years ago I used to organize parties and events, and I genuinely loved it. Maybe that's why it finally worked out — or maybe it was just that this was my seventh attempt at launching a product of my own. Six months later my co-founder and I had built a detective quest and that's how our online team-building platform, Detectolic Games, got started.

For a lot of distributed teams, online is now the only realistic way to get everyone in one place, switch off for a bit, and interact without a Jira ticket attached. Over the past year we've run 200+ events for tech companies of every size, so I figured I'd share what we've learned. If you're an HR lead or an engineering manager trying to put together something remote for your team, this is for you.

1. Everybody's Already Skeptical

The online events market is growing fast, but it's still young — which means you can absolutely still run into quizzes built in PowerPoint. Seriously. A lot of people have already sat through something bad and now treat every online event with suspicion.

It's the same as anywhere else: cheap usually means cringe. Good online events cost money, because someone poured a lot of engineering hours and a lot of dollars into them.

What to do:

• See what's in the box. A slick landing page tells you nothing about the actual experience. Ask the vendor to let your organizing team play a test run, or at minimum to send you gameplay footage, so you know what you're buying and whether your colleagues will actually enjoy it.
• Sell it internally. The experience can start before the event does. Think about how to warm people up and get registration numbers up. If you're running a quiz, send out a few teaser puzzles a week or two ahead — get people engaged early and let them bank some bonus points before the thing even starts.

2. You Are Where Your Attention Is

A monitor is a box of temptations. At any given second a work email lands, or a new meme drops in the group chat. We like to believe we can listen to the host, absorb the rules, and finish typing that email all at once. We can't.

What to do:

• Pick the right format. Some people love social deduction games, some love quizzes, some love online tastings. In our experience the formats that land best are the ones with variety — different types of tasks alternating throughout. Ideally tied together by one storyline or theme, because people love stories.
• Pace is everything. An online event has to be directed like a piece of theater, or people won't make it to the end without checking out. In the first few seconds you need to convince everyone that this will actually be fun and they didn't waste their evening logging in. An emotion, a good joke, a surprise — anything. After that it should build like a proper narrative: setup, climax, resolution. We're all conditioned by books and films and TV to respond to that structure, and it works just as well here. And if the format involves a host, that host needs to be charismatic and high-energy. They're carrying the room.

3. Together, But Not a Mob

Obviously you want everyone engaged, everyone talking, everyone feeling like one team. That's the hard mode objective — it's tough enough to pull off in person, and online, especially with a big headcount, you usually have to split people into groups, teams, or breakout rooms.

Two reasons. First, it stops the loudest extroverts from eating all the airtime. Second, smaller groups give everyone room to actually show up and interact.

On top of that, energy is always higher in activities with a friendly competitive edge. Belonging to a team and having someone to beat sharpens people's interest and pulls them in. And splitting into teams is a great excuse to mix colleagues who don't normally cross paths.

4. Picking the Right Activity

Generally, trivia attracts the well-read ones, quests attract the board game crowd, and social deduction games attract extroverts. People like showing off what they're good at, and they like it even more when others notice.

But the activity still has to be equally interesting to everyone, and you need to factor in what your team has done before. If this is one of your first online events, start with something simpler.

What to do:

• Get the theme right, not just the format. When people are short on adrenaline, horror plots and murder mysteries sell like crazy. When life is already stressful enough, they want something light and warm — somewhere to escape to for an hour.
• Brief your vendor properly, in advance. Has the team done online activities before? What's the employee profile? How many new hires? If the format involves splitting into teams, think about how you want that done — group people from the same department for better chemistry, or deliberately mix them so they get to know each other.
• Account for your team's quirks. One of our clients was obsessed with quests. They'd played everything out there, and nothing was hard enough anymore. So with their blessing we cranked the difficulty to maximum and offered them a ranked score. On top of that, the host played it up like he'd recognized their names — apparently they were on a special watchlist circulated among event agencies, as the players who beat the casino. :)

5. Timing

The big catch with online is that your people have already spent the entire day in front of a monitor, and you're asking them to stay there for another hour or two.

What to do:

• Earlier is better. In our experience, the later the game, the fewer people show up. And if the event lands at least partly within working hours, attendance jumps immediately.
• Don't do weekends. Companies almost never book games for a Saturday, and for good reason. It's not the slot.
• Cap it at 60-90 minutes. That's enough time for people to get properly immersed, and not enough time for them to get tired or bored.

6. Hybrid Events

If part of your team is meeting in person and part is joining remotely, think hard about how not to leave the remote half out in the cold.

What to do:

• Give the online group their own host or moderator, with a backup plan for when the tech inevitably misbehaves and the two halves can't sync. That way the remote people don't feel abandoned, and the event happens no matter what.
• If the whole event is online but some employees are physically together, have them join from a single account and a single device — from a meeting room with a big screen, for example. Just test the setup beforehand. Please test the setup beforehand.

7. Lower the Barrier to Entry

Online, attention is easy to lose. The fewer obstacles, complications, and rules, the better your odds that everything goes the way it should.

What to do:

• Always have a host or coordinator, whether you're running this yourself or through a vendor. Events where the team has to figure everything out on their own are a serious gamble. For one thing, people would always rather ask a human than message support or dig through a manual. For another, having a host is the human-interaction part — and in a format that's already less alive by default, that's not the thing to cut.
• Keep the setup light. Board game people will happily spend an hour learning rules, but if you're running something for a general audience, the faster the actual activity starts, the better. Complicated rules, fiddly mechanics, awkward controls, or — worst of all — installing extra software (hello to everyone who needs to file an IT ticket for that) all drive engagement down and drop-off up.
• Ideally, get a turnkey vendor. Then you, the client, get to be an actual participant instead of a stage manager — you can relax, take part, and watch how your people respond.

8. Process vs. Result

When you play football with friends, you're focused on the process. When people play football at the World Cup, nobody cares about the process — it's all result. If your event has a competitive element, make sure winning is a nice bonus rather than the point.

A note on prizes: for the record, about one company in ten actually gives them out, usually internal currency or some merch. Whatever you do, don't make them too expensive, because expensive prizes turn a game into a high-stakes competition.

One of our clients was celebrating the company's anniversary and announced that the quest winners would get brand new iPhones — the idea being to boost turnout. It was the tensest game we've ever run. Everyone wanted that prize so badly that nobody could relax and enjoy any of it.

In short: don't turn your game into Squid Game. And isn't an event the company paid for already a gift in itself?

9. Expectations Are There to Be Exceeded

A personalized touch is what takes an event to another level. So if you need something special, it helps to work with a product you can actually customize.

Real customization isn't slapping your company logo into the interface — it's usually a separate project that takes time, resources, and flexibility from the vendor. We can, for example, turn your employees into characters in the game, illustrated and voiced by them. But there are also plenty of tools that let you pull off similar tricks on your own.

What to do:

• You don't need to touch any code. Just give your vendor something interesting about your company — better yet, share a fresh internal meme so the host can work it into the intro.
• Play around with third-party tools. A lot of them are free, like Kahoot or Wordwall. You can build quizzes, challenges, or mini-games based on your own stories, facts, and company history. One trick: run photos of your colleagues through Midjourney in some specific style, then have everyone guess who's who. (We've got a whole article on our site with free ideas for running a team building yourself.)

The Point of All This

Team building has taken on a different meaning lately. It's not just entertainment to make the team atmosphere friendlier anymore — it's become a form of therapy that helps people switch off and shed some stress. That's especially true for formats with a healthy dose of humor in them, since laughter genuinely lowers cortisol and raises endorphins.

Online has real limits, obviously, and it's not a cure-all. But get it right and the team building will be virtual while your colleagues' emotions are completely real.