How to Host The Perfect Virtual Lunch For Your Remote Team Members
With the pandemic, more and more businesses are now settling in a hybrid or remote work setting. This means a lot of Zoom lunches and happy hours. It can be hard for businesses to keep their remote employees engaged and happy, which is why hosting some awesome virtual activities like virtual team lunch meetings, virtual lunch & learn, or virtual team-building activities can really help!
How do you make a virtual lunch?
First off, you have to choose your video conferencing platform. Chances are that you are already using tools like Slack, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime or Zoom, but for an event where you want to garner employee engagement and natural conversations, you need a tool that enables you to not only do video conferences, but also networking and games.
A tool like Remo, where you can go from table to table, discuss with your team, create fun team-building exercises, and most importantly, talk just like you would face to face.
And you’re in luck, Remo has a free plan you can use in a matter of minutes for your next virtual lunch.
What do you do at a virtual lunch?
Apart form the lunch itself, there are multiple fun ways to entertain your remote team on your next virtual lunch, and to break the monotony of the typical workday. Here are a couple examples:
Icebreakers: It's always best to start with an icebreaker, it can be a funny question about everyone's personal life such as: What's your favorite podcast and why, if you were a superhero, what would be your superpower? Or what’s your favorite cheese.
Team building activities: Why not include some team building exercises or games like virtual scavenger hunt, escape room, virtual bingo, and more. Or create a fake new product or a fake Ted Talk just to cooperate on a fun task together for a certain amount of time. There are tons of fun remote party games and activities you can plan.
How do I get my team lunch virtually?
Now's the fun part, get your team some lunch! 🍕
There are tons of different lunch ideas for food catering and food delivery depending on what you need, from a snack box to a pizza party or a more corporate lunch box.
Here are some of our favorite options:
1. Hoppier
Hoppier is one of the simplest solutions if you have a lot of remote employees, in different locations, and that you want to please everyone.
They provide each employee with a gift card to use on various vendor platforms like Grubhub, Postmates, Deliveroo, Doordash, Uber Eats, etc.
You can set a time limit so that your employees can only use it during the event timeframe. It’s a very easy way to provide lunch for your event or remote lunch.
Type of food: Gift cards
Delivery: International
2. Lunchpool
Lunchpool provides fun team experiences to help your team stay engaged, connected, and well-fed, with lunch options, happy hours, coffee breaks and a lot of different activities. They even offer Remo virtual office spaces to help your remote workforce perform better by giving them a customized virtual office space to meaningfully collaborate and connect.
Type of food: Pizza, custom meals, all types of food depending on the event.
Delivery: Worldwide
3. SnackMagic
SnackMagic offers personalized snack boxes and branded swag that are super easy to gift and ridiculously fun to get. You pay, they pick, and SnackMagic delivers to their doorsteps.
Don’t forget your international attendees, employees and clients! SnackMagic lets overseas snackers select a themed box, which our tastemakers tailor to their country and dietary restrictions.
Ordering is as easy as our domestic gifts—all you need is their email address.
Type of food: Snack boxes, drinks, swag
Delivery: International
4. Pizzatime
Throwing a pizza party for your remote team, all in different time zones has never been easier with Pizzatime. All you have to do is enter the date and time of the event, the number of attendees, and the tool takes care of everything. The delivery is fully global and if they cannot deliver pizza to someone (like a very remote location) they will send a gift card.
Type of food: Pizza (of course) but also salads and burger options.
Delivery: International
5. GetSomeClass
Want high-end virtual social fun for connecting your remote teams? GetSomeClass offers contemporary, innovative, and funky virtual events. Your team will enjoy food get-togethers like steak to tortilla nights, pizza, charcuterie board-making and even custom-food packages.
GetSomeClass also has unique experiences like chess with a Grandmaster to Espionage or Name That Tune games that will create a memorable, unforgettable time for your team!
They ship kits and even provide hosts for a full experiential package.
Type of food: Depends on the package (Steaks, cocktails and more)
Delivery: USA - Possibilities for other countries upon request.
6. Dineable
Dineable does all the logistics for a full catering for your virtual event, happy hour or virtual lunch, everything from snack boxes, cheese tasting, to full blown dinners. They can also provide wine and alcohol options thanks to their partners.
Type of food: Snack boxes, dinners, alcohol
Delivery: USA but they can ship to other countries as well with an extra fee.
7. Happied
Happied provides popular experience kits, either for cocktail making, bubble tea, sushi making, that can be done by yourself or with an instructor. This is a great option for team building, as it is a lunch and a team building activity all in one.
Type of food: Snack boxes, dinners, alcohol
Delivery: USA but they can ship internationally with an extra fee.
8. Cocktail Courier
Cocktail Courier delivers cocktail kits to create cocktail experiences at home, their kits include all the fresh ingredients necessary, as well as easy to follow recipe cards that will have you making your cocktails in under 15 minutes.
Type of food: Cocktail kits.
Delivery: USA
Break the Zoom doom in your next virtual lunch!
With all these ideas, from using a networking tool like Remo, to creating team building experiences, or even having a performer, these are sure to break the Zoom doom, entertain your attendees, or engage your remote team tremendously.
Your virtual lunches will never be the same once you try one of these amazing virtual lunch catering options.
