5 quick tips for creating exciting virtual icebreaker questions for work
Icebreakers are a great way to get conversations started at work. They are excellent for team building, welcoming new employees, and learning more about one another as co-workers. If well-executed, icebreakers can lead to valuable professional relationships that may never have materialized through everyday Zoom meetings. But how do you plan and incorporate these activities into your video conferences or virtual team offsite? Below, we outline five quick tips to help you create inclusive and exciting icebreaker questions for work.
Define your goals and purpose
The best way to get the most out of your icebreakers is to identify and outline what you want to achieve and why you’re engaging in such an activity. For smart, measurable, and actionable goals, you need to ask yourself “why are we doing this”. Are we doing this to connect remote employees so they don’t feel isolated? Is it to get them excited about working with us? Or is this solely to welcome our new employees and make them feel comfortable on their first tasks? Answering these questions will automatically lead to excellent goals and help teams decide on the type of icebreaker questions to use.
Choosing your team’s favorite icebreaker questions
Once you’re clear about what you want to achieve, the next step is to decide the type of icebreaker questions you want to add to your virtual activities. Here, the host can create a poll around sports, pop culture, the company, etc, and ask employees to choose their favorite themes, as well as the icebreakers that interest them. Once they select their favorite themes, these can serve as the basis for creating icebreaker questions. It’s also a great way to identify personality types in your company (introverts or extroverts) and tailor your questions to meet their needs.
Frequent icebreakers throughout meetings
A lot of icebreakers may come at the beginning of a video meeting because that’s when things become quiet and it’s difficult to get people talking. However, Zoom fatigue happens and these moments of silence can creep into the middle or ending part of any meeting. Hosts should therefore plan icebreaker questions throughout the meeting to ensure that at any point in time, whenever there is an awkward silence, they have an icebreaker to start up the conversation again.
Infuse humor into icebreaker questions
Icebreaker questions can ignite exciting conversations, but they can also bore, if not well framed. Whenever you plan to include icebreakers in Zoom meetings, make sure whoever is asking them infuses some level of humor. Not only does this turn boring questions into fun ones, but it also makes whoever is answering them confident and excited.
Take into consideration participants’ location and technology
While some may be traveling, others could be working from their home offices or from a co-working space. Just as they will join video meetings from different locations, they will also use different devices while on varying internet quality. Taking these into consideration when creating icebreaker questions for work helps define who can be on camera, who is joining through a dial-in phone, or who is only listening and can’t contribute because of their location or internet provider. This informs the type of icebreaker questions to use and how to get everyone to contribute either through video, audio, both, or text only.
