Try this virtual Summer Scavenger Hunt

I ran this summer scavenger hunt as a virtual offsite a few weeks ago for our teams. We have about 50 people total and about 30 attended and gave some pretty great reviews! I hope you can take this and bring some fun to your teams while working remotely.

Prep

I ran a survey asking about favorite La Croix flavors and favorite desserts. We made dessert themed Slack channels out of the responses and placed people according to their response. We ended up with silly names Pamplemousse Pie and Mango Brownie. Those who didn’t respond to the survey were “free agents” and were assigned teams during the kick off.

Time Commitment

We blocked off 2.5 hours and finished about 15 minutes early. To kick things off we watched Keanu play with puppies while people joined the main video conference (Way better than waiting in silence). It took about 15 minutes to go over the doc with all the context and rules. We also made sure everyone got assigned to a team and did a bit of shuffling around to even things out. Once we were ready, we told each team to create a doc from the template to fill with photos and captions. We would meet back in about 90 or when they were done. We had one team finish in just over an hour and other teams take the full 90 minutes. As teams finished they posted their doc in our group Slack channel.

We regrouped and took about 30 minutes to vote and declare a fan favorite. This was pretty low key and included a lot of socializing.

Balance

The incentive to finish quickly was balanced out by having a “Fan Favorite” prize and it was won by a team that took the full 90 minutes. It also helped keep everyone engaged even when two teams finish ahead of everyone else. Having everyone vote at the end also sparked a lot of conversations as everyone looked over photos and captions. The items are designed to give a peek into people’s fun side and spark a few conversations anyways. Captions also helped give everyone something to do and made it more fun to review another team’s work.

We had some person check in on each team, answer questions. And specify that photos has to be taken the day-of, not just found on the Internet.

Budget Commitment

We let everyone expense $15 to get themselves ice cream. Some exceptions for other desserts were made, including someone in the wilderness of Hawaii who couldn’t get ice cream in any reasonable time period.

We also awarded $25 gift cards to two winning teams.

All in all this was a rather inexpensive offsite. For comparison, taking everyone out to dinner would have been more expensive.

Response

The team really enjoyed having some amount of bonding. We mixed and matched across 3 scrum teams. There was also a bit of light-hearted trash talking which people really got into. This was a little surprising coming from some of the usually quiet types, but it was great to see personality come through.

It’s been tough transitioning to our new virtual work setup, if anyone else has ideas on fostering social connections please send an email!