10 Fun Virtual Icebreakers to Take Remote Working to the Next Level
Easy-to-do. No special tools required. Just group chat.
I’ve been trying to refrain from doing any remote working posts — I don't want to add to the flood of them that has already ensued the past month.
But the past couple of weeks I’ve been asked by a number of people for ideas on remote icebreakers and/or team building activities now that many of us are working remotely.
Several conversations later and I’ve finally managed to convince myself to write this up in the hope that others may benefit from it — and if it ends up being more remote working spam, I’m sorry!
So here’s the list of 10 simple and fun icebreakers that are tool agnostic. All you need is a way to communicate (duh!) and share images with each other — it’s as easy as that!
1. Emoji check-in 🥰
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.
You can even modify this to be how they feel the sprint went or project, etc.
2. Sketching or Drawing ✏️
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!).
Sketching is something that you can do anywhere. And I don’t mean just the Design Sprint activity — I’m talking about drawing.
Drawing is super flexible and lightweight and can be done in many different ways.
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. 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! haha!
A few different sketching/ drawing activities I’ve done in the past:
- 😄 Create your own emoji
- 📝 Draw the sprint (peaks and valleys)
- 🎢 Sprint rollercoaster
- 🦸 What’s your superpower? Draw your own superhero with that power
All very easy to do. 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.
Most of the time I just ask each person to take a pic and send it to the group chat — it’s as easy as that!
3. Candy Love (remote version) 🍬
*This is a modification on the team-building activity called Candy Love.
For those unfamiliar with the activity, Candy Love is a team-building activity or icebreaker where you have a jar of coloured lollies — like M&Ms.
You pass the jar around and each team member has to remove a lolly from the jar. Depending on the colour they retrieve there will be a different question associated with that colour that they have to answer.
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 😬
Which is why for remote teams I’ve generally used websites like WheelDecide to choose which question each person gets.
For the best effect, I generally have a mix of both work and non-work questions.
4. “Two truths and a lie” 🤫
A simple, but a good one and very easy to do remote.
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. The group has to guess which of the 3 is a lie — it’s good fun!
5. Share an embarrassing photo 🖼️
This is a great team-building activity to get to know each other on a more personal level. 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.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be from your phone, you may even want to share that terrible family photo framed on your bookshelf.
You’ll be sure to get plenty of laughs out of this one, learn a thing or two about each other, and become closer as a team.
6. If you could be anywhere in the world right now 🗺️
As the title suggests this activity is simply asking the question — “if you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?”
Now there are three variations on how to facilitate this one virtually.
The first is if you have a virtual whiteboard tool like Miro available or even office 365 PowerPoint where you can all edit at the same time. Use it to put an image of the world in the centre and get each person to put their name on the part of the world that they would rather be — it can be great fun to visualise!
Another option is to have someone compile the list of places into Google Maps using the ‘Saved Places’ feature — here’s a comprehensive how-to guide for using the feature.
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.
7. Tour guide 🤳
Yes, that’s right, time to become your team's very own tour guide…of where you are sitting.
This is super fun and one of my favourite remote icebreakers. Each person takes turns to give everyone a quick tour of their immediate surroundings — i.e. walk everyone through the room you are in, what’s on your desk, etc.
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.
Being able to see each other’s space a bit more before starting is a great way to feel more connected and like you are sitting in the room with them, even though you may be halfway across the world form one another.
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.
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! #truestory 😂
8. Picture Charades 🎞️
Like Charades but with a remote twist where you can only use images to explain whatever famous movie, book, etc they pick. Similar rules, no talking, and the images cannot be directly from the movie or book. I normally put a limit of 5 images.
Lisa Wagner had a great variation on this one where you use emojis instead:
“guess the movie 👨 👩 🛳 🏔 🌊”
9. Personality Tests 👯
Online personality tests make great icebreakers and team building activities.
There’s plenty of free ones, even ones for your creativity type and leadership style.
- Myers Briggs Personality Test
- Who Am I?
- 16 Personalities
- Creativity Type by Adobe
- Dan Goleman Leadership Styles
- What’s my Spirit Animal
- Harry Potter Sorting Hat (If you’re so inclined 🎩)
To save time you can get everyone to take the test beforehand. Otherwise, don't worry most of the tests are quite quick and should only take only a couple of minutes to complete.
Take turns sharing your results and if you have time you can even do a count and see how many similar or different the team is — i.e. how many ENTJ’s are in the team?
10. Ten Things in common 🔟
This activity is a great warm-up for an ideation session and requires zero equipment. As a group, you need to come up with a list of 10 things that everyone has in common — we are all wearing shoes, own a MacBook, etc.
Another variation, if you have everyone working from home, is to find 10 items that everyone has in their immediate area — we all sitting on a chair, we all have a notepad, etc.
✨Bonus✨
Keep the laughs and interaction going by creating a fun slack channel (or whichever tool you use).
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.
