My personal favourite drawing activity is “if the last sprint was an animal, what would it be and why?” They have to draw the animal and you get all kinds of interesting ones with even more interesting reasons why. Set up a new tradition and ask your team one random question each week or month. Just remember to give people the heads up to have pen and paper ready before you start or you’ll likely lose 10 minutes to everyone rummaging around their homes looking for them. We have written a separate post on ‘ How to run group activities in virtual classrooms for your students here. Finally, if you don’t have any of those tools available you can simply get each person to google an image of the location and share it with the team — or just say it. This can be a great opportunity for an icebreaker. For recurring meetings, come up with a different fun poll each time, I agree that Slido may process my personal information in accordance with Slido, 33 Beautiful Word Cloud Ideas for Your Meetings or Events, 4 Quizzes to Energize Your Virtual Meetings, How Talking About Wins and Struggles Helped Our Team Bond, 3+1 Quizzes for Your (Virtual) Holiday Office Party, 5 Quizzes to Energize Your Virtual Meetings, 15 Fresh Ideas For Your Next Virtual All-Hands Meeting. These can be presented in person, live in a virtual classroom, or as a video upload. Ice breakers for physical education classes combine endurance, strength and agility challenges with opportunities for building communication and cooperation skills. She created a slideshow of random travel pictures, started a story, and then called on one of our teammates to follow up on what she said based on what picture was currently up. 11. Even if it’s just as pitiful as the one we produced during our recent Brand team meeting (see below). A few tips for running great icebreakers: For example, you can try a rating poll such as this one: “On a scale of 1-7, how are you feeling today?”, You can then use the results as a discussion starter and ask your colleagues something like: “I can see that not everyone is feeling at their best. Crowdsource your colleagues’ personal or professional highlights of the last week or month. Encourage your teammates to use emoji reactions during your Zoom calls. May 21, 2020 by Erinn Wolfe in Best Practices, Mobility. Take a picture of a view from your window and post it to Slack, Find something smaller than your fingernail, Change your Zoom background to your favorite movie set, Click ‘Share Screen’, choose ‘Whiteboard’ and click ‘Share’. 12 Funny Icebreakers To Start Your Zoom Meetings, Happy Hours & Dates Off Strong. It’s a sweet little activity to make people talk and get to know one another better. Try a fun quiz with questions about your team. It’s as simple as the title suggests — go through your phone and find a funny or embarrassing photo from your past and share it with the team. Virtual icebreakers are small online team-building activities that help you – a meeting leader – to connect with your remote team on a personal level during your online meetings. They can share info about their interests, pets, family, goals, etc. Take Fika to an online environment. *This is a modification on the team-building activity called Candy Love. An icebreaker is a fun, interactive game that acts as an informal introduction and creates a personal connection among the team. What one thing should everybody stop doing right now? Our colleague Sabine shared a Zoom Whiteboard with us and asked us to draw our current mood on it. For those who aren’t familiar with the activity, it works like this; each person takes turns to say 3 things about themselves — two of those things are true and one is a lie. It makes for a great team-bonding experience. We since learned so many cool new things about one another! Show your colleagues that you care and ask your team how they are. and share images with each other — theses are as easy as that! So next time you’re running a remote meeting or training, why not try an icebreaker activity as a warm up exercise. So we channeled our inner Basquiat and came up with something that remotely resembles art. For recurring meetings, come up with a different fun poll each time, here are some for your inspiration. Remote work can be a lonely business. For Swedes, however, it is much more than that. Take inspiration from our APAC team and their cute heart symbols as they sent their love to the rest of their team who couldn’t join them on the call. Team members take turns introducing themselves and sharing information about their role on the team, their background, and some personal details. Ask them to either post it to your Slack channel or simply show it to the camera. Obviously, when you are remote you won't be able to pass a jar of lollies around — and post COVID-19 I’m not too sure how thrilled many people would be on the idea . Put your improvisation skills to the test. This is a great way to just share random stuff, have a good laugh as a team without it adding to the noise of other important channels. Set a time limit if you need to — 60 seconds per person — pro-tip if you are doing this with a large group a timer and time limit is a must to keep things short and sharp. Which is why for remote teams I’ve generally used websites like WheelDecide to choose which question each person gets. Perfect for back to school, these activities also develop important 21st-century skills like communication, creativity, and collaboration. 10 simple and fun virtual icebreakers and team building activities that are tool agnostic. Showing vulnerability is also a form of strength. You can even take it a little further and get inspired by our colleague Nadia who recently prepared for us a full-scale virtual scavenger hunt. Starting a meeting with some laughs will help your teammates feel more connected. To express love or happiness, do a little heart symbol by putting both hands together or a simple thumbs-up. This virtual icebreaker is ideal for larger meetings or virtual events – the more locations, the better the word cloud will look. This is a fun way to get to know each other a bit deeper and to feel more physically connected even though you’re remote. Each person takes turns to give everyone a quick tour of their immediate surroundings — i.e. There are many excellent resources on virtual icebreakers and more, available in published and online formats. 12. Sketching is something that you can do anywhere. You can also use word clouds to pick up your team’s thoughts and feelings. That’s a lot of missed opportunities to connect and get to know your colleagues. Virtual learning is not something we all thought would be happening, but it is new, real, and happening now! Place 4-5 students on one parachute and 4-5 students on another parachute. We shared some good laughs together! Icebreakers are easy to include in virtual meetings and virtual happy hours. Open your meeting with a question such as: “In one word, how would you describe the past week/month?”. Raise a hand into the camera when asking for a time to speak. Get your colleagues out of their chairs for a bit – they’ll appreciate a little physical activity. They’re also great for hiding a messy kitchen behind you, or a trespassing family member! As you kick off your meeting, ask your teammates to post their top moments in an open text poll. Keep the laughs and interaction going by creating a fun slack channel (or whichever tool you use). We hope you’ll try one of these icebreakers at your next virtual meeting. A slow start after the weekend? A simple round table team check-in but this time instead of a one-word or something, you pic an emoji that best describes how you are feeling right now. Intro speeches: Ask students to prepare a speech about themselves. There are many icebreakers you can do in face-to-face training sessions and some of them are classics that corporate trainers all over the world have been using for quite a while. Use virtual icebreakers. What's hot. There’s plenty of free ones, even ones for your creativity type and leadership style. Although virtual icebreakers can be a lot of fun, they’re not appropriate for every meeting. All you need is a way to communicate (duh!) I recommend including icebreakers at the beginning of every virtual meeting you do. We took turns in telling crazy things we did during our imaginary trip and let me tell you, it was some ride! Collect two true facts and one false fact about a colleague and put it into a multiple choice poll. The one I will always remember was the “elephant-unicorn” I had someone draw once, that’s because it was both half impossible and mythical as well as blindly charging ahead through the jungle! With a good icebreaker, you can set the mood for the meeting, give your online participants a chance to speak, and make them more comfortable sharing and interacting throughout. Warning if you are like me and work with a bunch of designers who are extremely skilled in photoshop, they will no doubt find something in your room to photoshop and mortify you with after! Collect interesting facts about each team member and then let other colleagues guess away. 6 Great Virtual Meeting Icebreakers By Georgia McMillan May 21, 2020 Whether it’s a short introductory icebreaker or a team-building activity, icebreakers, bonding breakouts and trust exercises have become commonplace at meetings and events. haha! Take a different one each time — make funny faces, bring in your pets, do a crazy gesture, be creative. It’s a Swedish word often interpreted as “a coffee and cake break”. For your inspiration, here are 20 ideas for virtual icebreakers that worked for us and were fun to participate in – even for the introverts! how many ENTJ’s are in the team? These photos also make nice content for your social media, internal newsletters, or Slack channels! Create some art together. Since not everyone may be comfortable with sharing this verbally, ask your team members via a poll. CHECK IN PROTOCOL. Besides highlights, share also some of the failures of the last month. For the best effect, I generally have a mix of both work and non-work questions. It’s about taking a break from everything for a while and enjoying quality time with friends or colleagues over a cup of coffee or tea. Then, at the beginning of your meeting, ask your team to guess which one of the statements about this colleague is a lie. Here’s another one from the ‘Get to know your colleagues better’ series. It’s important that you identify your audience first. Draw your own superhero with that power. But it was so much fun, we swear! Everyone (I hope) has both paper and pens in their house, if not then perhaps you have an iPad that you can sketch on (you eco-friendly warrior!). For example, instead of clapping when celebrating something, shake hands in the air. This icebreaker is great for taking a pulse check of the overall atmosphere in the team and detecting possible downturns. You can call it however you like – virtual watercooler talks, virtual happy hour, you name it. As summer is slowly coming to an end, it’s time to revamp some of our icebreakers for the beginning of school to make them ready for a virtual environment! If you plan way ahead, you could even email or mail meeting tools that will be referenced during the meeting. She gave us 5 minutes to fulfill 20 tasks such as: When the time was up, we got back together on Zoom and shared funny stories behind the objects that we brought. Depending on the colour they retrieve there will be a different question associated with that colour that they have to answer. As your colleagues post their locations, give them a special shout-out. So here’s the list of 10 simple and fun icebreakers that are tool agnostic. How do you run icebreakers for online sessions though? Tip: You can also let your colleagues vote for the best background through a Slido poll. By Marisa Casciano. Having microphones muted during a video call is a good practice to avoid any disturbing background noises, but it often hinders spontaneous communication between people. Starting a meeting with some laughs will help your teammates feel more connected. Let us conclude this list with this tiny simple icebreaker: Ask your colleagues to go to their phones, and dig out the last photo that they took. Maria Corte shares her Top 5 large group ice breakers and team building activities! Virtual icebreaker ideas for online meetings. Sharing is caring – and that should apply for both the good and the bad. Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site! You pass the jar around and each team member has to remove a lolly from the jar. This is super fun and one of my favourite remote icebreakers. In virtual meetings, formal icebreakers are more effective than a blanket opening question like “how was your weekend?” because they are designed to allow everyone to speak. #truestory . Icebreakers are questions or fun games to initiate light-hearted conversations to create a relaxed work environment. This is a standalone icebreaker you can use with new teams or new workers joining teams. Physical education ice breaker activities prepare students young and old to work in teams to complete physical challenges. 6 Great Icebreakers for Virtual Team Meetings. Classroom activities and virtual icebreakers can be the beginning of extensive lessons. They add laughter to an otherwise potentially scary experience.They bring increased feelings of alignment to your employees, and they will help you combat loneliness as everyone works remotely. This icebreaker is inspired by my colleague Sabine, who decided that since our team-building trip couldn’t happen this year, at least we’ll make up a cool story of how it went. Sometimes, it’s hard to get a sense of how your team members are feeling – especially during larger meetings. Virtual Icebreakers and Connection Activities. Icebreaker games need to be speedy. And I don’t mean just the Design Sprint activity — I’m talking about drawing. Pick any type of annotation tools you like – drawing, shapes, texts, you name it! Similar rules, no talking, and the images cannot be directly from the movie or book. You can then put people’s names in a Slido multiple choice poll and have your colleagues vote for the best shot! 14 Virtual Happy Hour Icebreakers That'll Bring Your Crew Closer Than Ever. Virtual icebreakers for remote meetings help you maintain a sense of cohesion with your group. Folks who dial in via video conference often have a hard time interjecting during a team conversation, so icebreakers give them the space to make themselves heard from the start. By the end, the word cloud will create a nice collage of all the different places. Like Charades but with a remote twist where you can only use images to explain whatever famous movie, book, etc they pick. 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