Icebreakers are fun and interactive activities that allow companies to start their meetings in a unique way and create a friendly atmosphere that promotes communication.
They are a great way to encourage collaboration and build connections among team members. Therefore, it is important to diversify these icebreakers and tailor them to the meeting’s objective. Also, consider changing your icebreakers if you have recurring meetings with the same group of people to avoid monotony.
Introducing new activities generates interest among participants, breaks the routine, and encourages more active participation and better interaction. These new activities also prompt participants to think differently and step out of their comfort zone.
20 activities to break the ice during your events:
To encourage interaction during your meetings, consider using icebreakers that allow your colleagues to build connections, express themselves freely, and above all, promote a relaxed atmosphere.
In the world of icebreakers, there are numerous categories, each with a specific goal. To help energize your meetings, we have carefully selected 20 icebreakers, categorized by types of activities. You can choose from these suggestions the ones that best fit your context and meeting objectives.
- Getting to know each other:
- Introduce Yourself in One Word: This activity offers a simple and swift way to facilitate rapid and memorable introductions. By inviting participants to select a single word that encapsulates their essence, you encourage the expression of their personality and individuality. This not only fosters interaction and discovery within the group but also creates an opportunity for meaningful connections.
To streamline this activity, we offer a convenient and pre-designed “Word Cloud” template. This tool enables the collection and real-time display of the words chosen by your participants, creating an engaging and visually appealing word cloud. With this template, you can effortlessly capture and showcase the collective expressions of your participants.
- Cross-Presentation: This activity serves as an effective and enjoyable method to facilitate participants’ acquaintance and foster positive interactions. Its primary objective is to cultivate a friendly environment and enhance active listening within the group.
The activity involves pairing participants, ideally with individuals who are not yet acquainted. Each pair takes turns presenting one another, allowing both individuals to share personal information and discover intriguing aspects of each other’s lives. This icebreaker proves especially effective during team-building sessions as it promotes mutual discovery and strengthens the bonds among participants, creating a cohesive and supportive atmosphere.
- What’s Your Story? The objective of this activity is to create deeper connections by uncovering unexpected aspects of their colleagues’ lives. Each participant is invited to share a personal story without revealing their identity. The other participants then have to guess who each story belongs to.
With Beekast, use the “Secret Story” template to facilitate the implementation of this activity by providing a clear framework and guiding participants through the process. The shared stories can be funny, inspiring, touching, or surprising, allowing participants to get to know each other better and develop a sense of deeper connection. - Fun Facts: This activity is an excellent way to create a relaxed and friendly atmosphere during presentations, allowing participants to get to know each other in a fun way.
Here, each participant is invited to choose a funny anecdote from their life and share it with the rest of the group. The ready-to-use template provided by Beekast allows you to create moments of laughter, relaxation, and connection by revealing surprising or amusing aspects of each person’s personality.
- Enhance team cohesion :
- Helium Stick: In this icebreaker, participants work together to lower a stick to the ground while ensuring that they never lose contact with it. This activity can be used at the beginning of a meeting to break the ice, in response to an intense debate to lighten the atmosphere, or even during a meeting to energize participants.
It fosters dynamic discussions and exploration of diverse themes, fueling collaborative efforts towards a shared objective. Participants are empowered to engage in effective communication, active listening, and innovative problem-solving, ultimately fortifying team cohesion.
- Find the Song Title: Designed to encourage collaboration, this icebreaker also stimulates engagement and creativity within a group.
During this activity, excerpts of song lyrics are presented to participants who are invited to guess the corresponding song title. Drawing on the familiarity of popular songs creates a friendly and playful atmosphere, fostering active participation.
- The Marshmallow Challenge: This icebreaker is used in large companies to promote team building through a fun and challenging activity. It is ideal for a large number of participants.
Form small groups of 4 to 5 people and assign each group a table with the necessary materials (spaghetti, tape, string, and a marshmallow). The challenge is to build, in a limited amount of time, the tallest freestanding structure possible, with the marshmallow placed on top.
- Bull’s Eye: What makes this icebreaker unique is that it allows your team to stand up and move together, and can be done in a clear space on your premises.
The activity involves presenting several topics to your participants and setting an object representing the central point. Then, you ask your colleagues to physically position themselves in the space according to their degree of agreement with the presented idea. The position they choose reflects their level of agreement, thus creating a physical visualization of the team’s collective opinion. - The “Hello Hello” game: This activity is used to encourage interaction and communication within a group. It creates a positive atmosphere and encourages smiles and friendly exchanges among participants.
The participants stand in a circle, and each takes a turn approaching a group member to say “Hello” in a creative way, whether it’s singing, shouting, or any other creative manner. The possibilities are endless, but the goal is singular: to have a moment of humor and laughter among the participants! - The Constellation: This activity allows facilitators to quickly understand a group’s position on a subject. Simply place an object in the center of the room where the meeting occurs and state the statements.
Each participant will have an object that they will position either near the main object if they agree with the statement or far away if they disagree. Indeed, the distance between the participant’s object and the chosen object is an indicator of their response to the statement. - Egg Drop Challenge: A creative icebreaker to test teams’ ingenuity! This game involves dropping an egg from a one-meter height without breaking it. You form teams and distribute an egg, sheets of paper, string, and other miscellaneous materials that your colleagues can use.
Using the provided materials, your colleagues must build a device that protects the egg and prevents it from breaking when dropped for 15 or 20 minutes. If the participants succeed in this challenge, you can increase the height to two meters for an even more difficult challenge.
- Assessing Employees’ Mood:
- Weather of the Day: In this activity, each participant is invited to choose a weather metaphor that describes their current emotional state. Then, participants take turns expressing their choice and sharing their thoughts about it. This activity is ideal for assessing the mood of the participants and promoting better mutual understanding, allowing participants to get to know each other better within the group.
Beekast offers the ready-to-use “Emoji Gauge” template, available in different variations such as Smileys, superheroes, Weather, Star Wars, and Christmas. You can use this template to assess the mood of your employees after a given period and thus foster better mutual understanding within the group.
- The Company Tree: The main idea here is to create a visual representation of the team, allowing each employee to express their position and role within the team and/or the company.
This activity promotes discussions around potentially important topics, encourages communication, and strengthens collaboration within the team. Use the “Blob Tree” template available in various variations such as boat, building, beach, train, back-to-school, building, and Christmas.
- Film Critique: This activity involves expressing one’s state of mind on a topic using a list of suggested films. Participants choose the film that best represents their work or their relationship with work at the moment.
To delve deeper into this activity, you can invite participants to explain the reasons behind their choice and share the story associated with the selected film. This activity, offered by Beekast, can be used in meetings and training sessions to foster discussions and exchanges about professional experiences. - Prisoner, Shopper, Vacationer, Explorer: This template is designed to measure the engagement and posture of your employees at the beginning of a meeting. What sets it apart is that it allows for anonymously collecting the feelings and interests of each individual.
During the introduction of the meeting topic, each participant is free to position themselves wherever they choose among these roles. Beekast offers this “ESVP” template for your sessions, with classic, pirate, and Star Wars variations. It can be used in training sessions and collaborative workshops.
- Encourage creativity :
- The Tower of Emotions: This activity promotes the sharing of emotions and encourages understanding and empathy among participants. The activity involves providing LEGO bricks or stickers of different colors and the same size, with each color representing a specific emotion.
Each team member is invited to choose a brick or sticker and place it on the tower, where each level corresponds to a day. At the end of the activity, each participant explains the reason for their choice, and the whole group engages in a discussion about the emotions chosen.
- Potato Challenge: This fun icebreaker involves shaping one’s avatar in 5 minutes using various materials such as potatoes, modeling clay, or paint. The activity helps unleash participants’ creativity and reconnect with the playful spirit of childhood!
Beekast offers the “Create Your Character” template! Here, participants can build characters that resemble them and reflect their current state of mind. These visual representations give facilitators an idea of the participants’ mood, allowing them to organize the meeting while considering these different perspectives.
- The Alphabet of Ideas: This is a fun activity that stimulates participants’ creativity and imagination. The objective is to generate ideas or words related to a given topic using imposed letters.
To set up this activity, you can prepare sticky notes with one letter of the alphabet on each of them, and then distribute them to the participants. Each participant will then write a proposal starting with the letter on the sticky note they received. Once all participants have written their ideas, a discussion can take place to discuss all the proposed ideas. - Puzzle: A well-known game that promotes collaboration, communication, and teamwork. In this game, participants work together to solve a puzzle, sharing their ideas and listening to suggestions from others.
The main goal of this game is to collectively solve the puzzle, pooling the skills and knowledge of each team member. By working together, participants strengthen their bonds and develop problem-solving skills. - Word and Image Association: This activity involves associating words and images to create connections and meanings. Its objective is to encourage participants to think inventively while promoting communication and collaboration within the group.
Use the Association activity to gamify the start of your meetings and allow participants to get to know each other. For example, associate participants’ names with their hobbies or interests.
In conclusion, icebreakers play an essential role in facilitating social interactions by breaking initial barriers. They are useful in various contexts such as professional meetings, training sessions, or social events.
These playful activities have the power to pave the way for deeper and more meaningful exchanges by fostering openness, trust, and engagement. They help break shyness and apprehension by creating a relaxed environment where everyone feels comfortable expressing their ideas, opinions, and personality.
