Virtual Team-Building Game: Vulnerability at Work
Experience virtual or in-person team building with gamified vulnerability that deepens psychological safety and enhances connection.
Discover a virtual team-building game that dives far deeper than your average icebreaker.
Whether your people are working from home, are hybrid employees, or come into the office every day, the ability to deeply bond people together is a priority for every organization. As a leader, you want your teams to trust each other, build authentic connections, and honor that they belong to something bigger than a job.
And yet, if your company is anything like many companies in this post-COVID era, you’ve probably heard complaints from your remote and/or hybrid teams about a lack of connection they feel with their colleagues. That lack of connection leads to isolation and heightened levels of stress and anxiety, which can take a toll on productivity, employee well-being, and employee satisfaction.1
All teams need healthy in-person and/or virtual team-building activities to combat the natural isolation that develops while some work from home. Beyond connection, teams need to feel psychologically safe with one another to take risks, innovate, and rely on each other despite the physical distance that may exist between them.
“Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.”
At RTC, we define psychological safety as the degree to which members of any given group (team or department) feel they can risk speaking up without being met with rejection or humiliation—thereby revealing more of the full person they are.
How do you increase psychological safety with your remote team? Get vulnerable.
We’d argue that the best way to support people feeling safe enough to take risks as a team is to practice getting vulnerable together. Virtual team games that combine fun, authenticity, and psychological safety are a simple yet essential way for building trust and connection.
It’s no lie that as human beings, we avoid getting vulnerable like we avoid the plague. We love to wear our armor to work because we believe it protects us from harm. But what is more harmful to high-performance teams is remaining isolated and disconnected.
What if you could get vulnerable (shudder!), deepen psychological safety, and have fun at the same time?
What if you could set down the armor and evoke real empathy from every person in the (virtual) room?
“Psychological safety sets the stage for a more honest, more challenging, more collaborative, and thus also more effective work environment.”
Fall in love with our vulnerability game for virtual team building.
Experience 90 minutes of team bonding that goes beyond the norm of corporate events. Our facilitated, in-person or remote team-building game invites employees to practice being more open, honest, and vulnerable with one another in a low-stakes, psychologically safe environment. Players can test the boundaries of their own comfort zone without judgment and while feeling deeply seen and heard.
We offer vulnerability game play for
remote team building
in-person team building
events and conferences.
This game is one of the best virtual team-building activities for small or large groups, as it can easily be hosted across computer screens or in-person at a location of your choosing.
Vulnerability at Work is based on our card game, Vulnerability is Sexy, which has been played at conferences and events around the world including the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, YPO, YEC, and the World-Changing Women’s Summit.
What are the benefits of practicing vulnerability as a team?
Beyond deepening psychological safety, practicing vulnerability at work
increases confidence,
inspires sincere connection,
activates deeper listening,
enhances the ability to suspend judgment,
creates more authentic communication,
breaks down barriers between people, and
awakens the group to see each others’ unique capabilities.
How we make it safe for people to wade into the vulnerability pool
100 percent presence.
Our gamified design promotes heightened presence among in-person or virtual teams through randomized turn-taking and unique questions and prompts for each player. It is much harder to rehearse in your head when you have no idea when your turn will be or what you’ll be responding to!
Modeling vulnerability.
Our experienced facilitators model various levels of vulnerability to make the space safer for players to practice. It’s easier to hand someone one of your secrets when they’ve trusted you to hold on to theirs.
You’re in control!
Our approach offers four “modes” of vulnerability—light, medium, heavy, and laughter. Players get to choose how deep they want to wade into the vulnerability pool—no judgment allowed!
What People Are Saying
- I’m reaching out to say thank you for facilitating our session this afternoon. It was powerful. Any chance I get to participate in sessions like that really helps me build a better version of myself — truly … I’m completely grateful for the opportunity to experience Vulnerability is Sexy.
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—Kevin Katynski, VP of Distribution, Earnest Machine
- We laughed (constantly), we cried (on multiple occasions), but most of all, we connected on a deeper level …
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—Torie Klocko, 2020 grad of Thunderbird School of Global Management
- Sometimes you spend months or years working alongside someone, and never really know them. Vulnerability is Sexy strives to bridge this gap and bring people closer through emotional, and hilarious, prompts. By the end of the retreat, everyone agreed that they learned more about the people around them and felt closer as a team.
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—Alex Dileo, ThreeSixtyEight
Once we’ve learned how to be vulnerable with aspects of one another’s personal lives, solving work challenges together feels like a breeze.
We’ve been champions of vulnerability for a looooong time.
As a fully-remote company, we are no strangers to virtual team building (and getting vulnerable across a computer screen!). Our history with vulnerability goes back to 2006; for 15 years we helped countless CEOs and thought leaders write the books they were born to write, using vulnerability-deepening techniques in our interviewing and editing processes.
In 2014 our founder attended the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit where he noticed people tended not to feel safe enough to take risks and get vulnerable with one another until the end of the conference. He hypothesized: What if people got vulnerable and made connections with one another near the beginning of an event? What risks in connecting with others might attendees take throughout the remaining time together that they otherwise weren’t taking? In response to that inquiry, we created our vulnerability walls, which have been installed at business events around the nation, including for Microsoft, ADP, Workday, and Marketo.
Our relationship to vulnerability skyrocketed from there. We created a card game, Corey Blake spoke on the topic on the TEDx stage, and we released an Addy-award-winning documentary titled Vulnerability is Sexy.
As champions of the benefits of vulnerability in the workplace, we are on a mission to bring gamified vulnerability and psychologically safe experiences to companies around the world.
Ready to play our virtual team-building game?
If you are looking to experience Vulnerability at Work with your teams, please fill out this simple contact form and we will be in touch shortly!
1. Katie Bishop, “Is Remote Work Worse for Wellbeing than People Think?,” BBC, June 17, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220616-is-remote-work-worse-for-wellbeing-than-people-think.