Virtual Icebreakers: Bring your team meetings to life

  • 7 July 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 1087 views

Userlevel 3
Badge

Remote and hybrid meetings are here to stay, but let's face it: a video call can't compete with spontaneous water cooler conversations or coffee break chats that we enjoyed face-to-face. Yet, these social interactions are more important than ever to retain team cohesion, battle loneliness, and keep the team spirit high.

We hosted a webinar Virtual Icebreakers: Bring your team meetings to life, full of tips on how to make remote team meetings more engaging and how to create ways that will help your team naturally bond.


Here are our top ones on how to use ice-breakers to:
 

1. Know your colleagues better

  • Guess whose desk: Collect pictures from your colleagues of their desks at home and add them into Slido multiple choice polls with a question: “Can you guess whose desk this is?” and give several options.

2. Spark fun & creativity

  • Home treasure hunt: Give your teammates a little task such as: “You have 25 seconds to fetch something yellow,” or “Get the newest thing in your apartment, then bring it back to show us”.

3. Collect work highlights

  • Silent hero: Give kudos to the heroes in your team. Kick-off your meeting with a word cloud poll such as: “Who was your silent hero this month?”

 

 💡What other ways do you use to help your team connect and keep the team spirit high?


Share your tips with us 👇🙏

 

Poll question: Do you use icebreakers?


2 replies

We have recently built completely new team in our company that is fully remote. Apart from having virtual offsite, I was also using parts of the team meetings for small team building activities to help the team get to know each other every week a bit better.

I used to open my meetings with Slido polls asking people various questions:

  • Any Would you rather…. are great to see how different people in your team think and it is also fun and interesting to listen to the reasoning of why they have picked what they’ve picked
  • Or more reflective questions such as, What new did you learn last week? or What was your highlight of the last week?
  • Or questions such as Who would you like to praise for last week and why? to build more appreciation in the team :)

It really helped our team to be more open and honest with each other and it helped us to build trust much faster.

And besides Slido my other favourite activity was having dinner/wine sessions where we were just talking about us. I found this game “Campfire stories” that was great to facilitate the discussion. 

Hello, I work in a very serious field, where the people aren't keen on fun or being 'silly' - how to deal with them? Do you have any recommendations?

Reply