15 Team Icebreakers For Virtual Meetings

Start with shoutouts so people who have accomplished something or helped someone out can be recognized. Give them a round of applause or snaps, or whatever funky celebration your company embraces. Estions can be about your company, such as “What is the name of our CMO’s cat? ” They can also be more general pop culture or timely, themed trivia about history, art, current events, and more. Host the best office Christmas scavenger hunt and get started planning with 40 of the best holiday scavenger hunt ideas.

A virtual circle of appreciation allows your employees to recognize each other and helps them feel more appreciated. To get started, decide how often you want your team to get together and what time works best for your group.

Why you need virtual icebreakers

If the players are unfamiliar with the animal’s sounds, then they may use gestures to describe the animals. To play this game, participants will remain silent as they act out a word or sentence. Simply put the performer on spotlight and let the rest of the team members will figure out the message from the performers’ gestures.

• The person who was just appreciated will share what they are thankful for about that person and the circle will continue clockwise.
• Working with large groups isn’t quite the same as working with small groups.
• The best option, of course, is to run all your meetings from a conference room or other professional workspace.
• If you and your team meet regularly, you can turn this into a tradition and run one quiz question at the start of every one of your meetings.

First Light is a quick virtual icebreaker that you can include in any meeting to get everyone thinking, talking, and working together. Virtual icebreakers don’t have to be complicated to be effective. Just asking questions is sometimes enough to forge real bonds between coworkers. Online team-building games are fun and social – they encourage interaction among coworkers and help bring back the camaraderie of a physical office. If you’re using multiple choice questions, provide four possible answers and ask participants to place their colored dot next to the correct answer. Remember our recommendation to kick off a meeting with music? Play a few bars of a song and see who can name that song first.

What are virtual icebreakers?

Personality quizzes or personality assessments are a great icebreaker idea for teams who want to get to know not only their peers, but also themselves on a much deeper level. All in all, they’re insightful, fun to analyze, icebreakers for virtual meetings and help employees learn more about their strengths, behaviors, patterns, and decision-making processes. If you want to host an icebreaker activity but have no time to prepare a challenging game, opt for The Handshake.

• If you’re holding a quick meeting but want to get to know everyone, try these quick ice breakers that take under five minutes.
• But in an increasingly remote-first world, icebreakers can help build the connections that might’ve developed over time in person.
• Thank you again for these great examples to the icebreaker collective.
• Have fun with your coworkers and discover who is the best virtual doodler.
• The participants must not speak during the entire exercise.
• Nifty is a tool that gives creative teams the solutions they need to collaborate and create content seamlessly, even when they can’t be in the same place.

If the office or room has a window, consider sharing photos of what your outside world looks like. Have employees (and you!) submit photos of themselves as children. For example, Sue could start and say, “Yesterday,” and then Tom would continue with “I,” and then Amy would say, “went,” and so forth.

Icebreaker: If You Could Choose Just One, Which One Would You Choose?

Using Zoom, you can host karaoke night with your employees. To do this, first send out an open-ended employee survey asking your team what their preferred karaoke songs are. That means selecting the right questions, getting teams together, facilitating trivia rounds, and keeping track of the score. During your circle of appreciation, call out one employee’s name. Ask the person shown to the right of them to start the circle and list one thing they are grateful for about that person. Before you host your virtual circle of appreciation, create a document and create a box for each employee with their name.

Since this pandemic began, employee engagement levels have been in flux. And research has shown that one of the key drivers behind this trend is often a diminished sense of community. Help your remote group become a dynamic team by starting with these questions and they will surely inspire many more in the future.

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Opening a meeting with an icebreaker can give people a chance to share who they are on work time. It also allows every type of person—outgoing or reserved, new or established—to feel included in the conversation. And, as a perk, it will enable team leaders to see team members’ personalities, skills, and learning styles in a way that might not be obvious when doing daily tasks. Are you looking to spice up your company’s online meetings but don’t know where to start? These 29 virtual ice breakers will leave you and your employees in stitches.