Before starting the activity, it’s essential to set some ground rules to ensure that the session is productive. You can remind everyone to respect each other’s ideas and opinions, avoid interrupting or dominating the conversation, and adhere to the time limit. If your team is filled with creative individuals looking for a fun and interactive icebreaker game, look no further than «Monster Workshop» on Miro.
- Using an anonymous poll, everyone submits a fact about themselves that others might not know.
- It’s a great way to encourage interaction and laughter while keeping the mood light and engaging.
- Start an icebreaker conversation about everyone’s favorite childhood costume if Halloween is coming up.
- Then, have everyone guess where they took the photo or what it depicts.
Why virtual icebreakers are essential for remote teams
And we all need that now and then, especially when working in isolation. As you kick off your meeting, ask your teammates to post their highlights in an open text poll. Then, display the highlights on the screen, and give a shout-out to each one. Use a ranking poll question, add as many options as you wish, and let your participants rank them.
Amazing Team-Building Activities for Conference Calls That Actually Work
Virtual bingo cards are easy to create and the game can be played either as a side activity or as a planned part of the meeting agenda. Think back to your childhood, when you bonded with others by spending time playing video games or engaging in group activities. Hypothetical questions put you in an imagined scenario, which can be unrealistic, funny, or even a bit absurd depending on what you ask. These questions encourage creativity and open-mindedness, making them a fun and engaging way to break the ice. While this question might not immediately break the ice, it opens the door to casual conversation and helps participants feel more comfortable sharing. Each person can bring one thing to your next conference call that they want to talk about.
Whatever the format, the goal is always to help your team be present in the meeting and begin making connections. The online format of the meeting should help determine your choice of icebreaker. Certain activities lend themselves less to virtual remote online meetings, such as model building games. It’s no secret that a successful icebreaker is one that is ideally suited to the format of the meeting, the size of the team, and the personalities of the employees. Turn your remote team-building event into a game by challenging team members to find and share items from their home offices based on creative prompts.
Guess the acronym
This icebreaker is just like “never have I ever,” but with your webcam. Then, you can call out participants in the most interesting locations to share where they’re joining from. Tell participants they can use the chat, their camera, or their microphone. As with any other facilitation activity, allow for different forms of participation to account for different personality types. Leaders in 100+ countries have fewer, better, shorter meetings thanks to Fellow.
They help integrate new team members
If that person is uncomfortable, thank them for trying and move on to the next. Science of People offers over 1000+ articles on people skills and nonverbal behavior. Your coworkers likely know a few jingles they either love or can’t stand.
Add it to the beginning of your team meetings and establish a constructive and empathetic work atmosphere. Sharing a personal photo and its story is a great way to bond with your team and learn more about icebreakers for virtual meetings each other’s lives and memories. Starting meetings off positively will set the tone for productive collaboration. Usually, it is a drinking game, but you don’t have to wait until you can meet in person with your distributed team to play.
By rotating roles between advice-seeker and advisor, team members build meaningful connections and support professional growth. Designed to get team members moving, these quick team-building activities boost energy and morale, making them perfect for remote workers during long conference calls. They’re a fun way to break up the day, support wellness, and help the entire team feel recharged in just a few minutes. Each puzzle requires different strengths, helping team leaders highlight the diverse talents within a cohesive team. This virtual team-building activity channels your team’s aspirations into a shared digital vision board, helping align individual and team goals. Team members add images and words to a digital whiteboard, sparking discussion and revealing unexpected connections that boost team cohesion and company culture.
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Its rich formatting options allow you to create visually appealing templates or guides for your team. You can also assign comments or action items directly within Docs. In this classic activity, participants take turns describing a word to their team without using a list of ‘taboo’ words related to that term. Share a funny or inspiring quote from someone on the team (collected in advance) and have others guess who said it. This activity creates a sense of camaraderie while highlighting unique personalities. Split into breakout rooms and ask each of the smaller groups to find five things they all have in common.
This activity is a tried and tested way to help create connections and can be a great icebreaker for virtual meetings too! Where possible, invite participants to share their truths and lies in an online whiteboard or shared document to make it easy to play and to debrief with later. To guarantee the success of your virtual icebreakers, a few key considerations can make the difference between an enjoyable, engaging activity and a dull one. Personality quizzes can be another engaging virtual icebreaker activity for remote teams, helping team members learn more about each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and working styles. By completing quizzes that assess various aspects of their personality, team members can gain insights into their own preferences and tendencies, as well as those of their colleagues. Spice up your virtual meetings and team bonding sessions with This or That – the AI-powered question generator that makes games easy and fun!
This activity fosters emotional intelligence, promotes open communication, and helps team members connect on a deeper level—even in virtual settings. It’s an excellent tool for remote teams to check in beyond the surface, creating a culture of empathy and psychological safety. First, invite people to open up the chat in your video conferencing app. Next, ask an icebreaker question, but instruct people not to send their answer until you say so.
- People can bond over their favorite pastime songs and get to know each other with a fun conversation.
- For more formal events, try to relate the topics to the meeting’s purpose.
- Prepare a few light-hearted, appropriate jokes to share at the start and during the middle of the meeting.
Did you know that 92% of employees admit to multitasking during meetings? Next, allow all groups a couple of minutes to discuss the topic before coming back to the main room to share what each pair talked about. In one of the meetings, he asked everyone to anonymously submit into Slido three brands they know they ‘love a bit more than is logical’. 💡 TipDon’t forget to give people enough time to think about their story and prepare for the short presentation. Sharing is caring – and that should apply to both the good and the bad.
You can then regroup and open a discussion about lessons that people learned from their failures. This fun game is great for introducing new colleagues or getting to know each other better. Collect three statements about each of your colleagues – two of them should be true facts and one should be a lie. Tell your colleagues to provide a lie that’s not so obvious so as to make it harder for others to guess. These are great get-to-know-you games and longer team-building activities that will both entertain and bring the team closer together.