Online team building activities at Kaleyra: How we have fun working from home

by Prarthana Sachdev | Apr 20, 2020

As a global product company with distributed teams, we at Kaleyra have always been involved with some degree of remote work. We are no novices to virtual collaboration tools such as Trello, Asana, and Figma. When the COVID-19 crisis hit us, we were quick to respond and equip our entire team with the resources required to work from home. Remote work soon became a way of our everyday professional lives. While we continued running operations without interruptions, we soon noticed that we missed interacting with each other offline. We missed the connections we made, the fun activities, the coffee breaks, the small happy interactions at work that bring us together as a team.

We realized that it was time to hang out and have fun virtually. Work from home does not mean the end of fun at work. Here is what we did for our online team building activities at Kaleyra:

Online Fun Fridays

Our dedicated Slack channels for brainstorming, culture, and activities came to our rescue as a key platform for driving employee engagement activities. Any team member from any part of the world could easily participate. We mostly set the timelines for the fun activities in line with the suitable time zones for all our remote teams. With Sudoku puzzles, fun games, and competitions, we slowly put the fun back in our Fridays.

Remote Coffee Breaks

As more and more teams went online for weekly and daily huddles, we joked that someday we would even have coffee breaks remotely. With access to Google Hangout, this became a reality, and we are now hooked to weekly virtual coffee breaks in the evening when we come online with a cup of coffee and have open interactions with each other in the team. Even the members of our Slack hobby clubs, such as the book lovers club, sprang into action, encouraging open, informal interactions in the group.

Virtual All Hands

One of our fundamental values is driving transparency, and company-wide meets, such as all-hands, are integral to our culture. When we started working online, we took our All-Hands meeting online as well and recorded the sessions to make it accessible for everyone. With reminders on Slack, it was easy to make everyone aware of all the remote social activities.

Our first All-Hands meeting on Zoom

Online Yoga Sessions

By popular demand, we recently conducted an online Yoga session. It was beautiful to see our team members and their families join the live workout session on Zoom. We are now considering more virtual skill-sharing meetings and fun activities such as therapeutic painting and presentation training. We are fortunate to have some incredible and talented team members who are voluntarily organizing and conducting these sessions for us.

Team Kaleyra in action during our first virtual yoga session

At Kaleyra, we are committed to promoting teamwork and a fun work culture that supports professional growth. We owe our success as a company to our people-centric culture and our-close knit team. We go that extra mile to create rewarding experiences for our teams, be it online or offline.

As we continue to challenge the status quo, build impactful solutions, and reset old working habits, we will preserve our hope and drive to create a positive and significant impact on the lives of all our stakeholders.

Want to join our Team? Check out current job openings here: https://kaleyra-talent.freshteam.com/jobs

Ashwini Janardhanan

Head of People and Culture - APAC at Kaleyra