Breaking the ice between your teammates or group members is essential, especially if they are new or early in the journey.
This also becomes quite important if you find your team losing their connection in-between or just burning out or feel worn out.
Especially, if your team works remotely, lack of communication and understanding between team members or employees can lead to major failures.
What you need to do is develop a sense of community in your workplace or team. They need to be connected to each other, have consistent engagement and interactions.
Not just professional, but also needed to be connected with each other on some personal level.
One of the best ways to increase the engagement is conducting ice-breaker fun games for your remote teams.
And if you are looking for such highly interactive and fun games, here are some best ideas for your remote teams.
One Word Game
This is one of the best games to break the ice in your remote team and help them open up to other people in the group.
It allows you to offer an initial context for the topic of the meeting you are going to conduct.
The game helps to reach the right mindset for the discussion by tapping into a much more comfortable communication zone.
To play this game, you need to divide your meeting participants into different smaller groups.
Now give them some time, like two or three minutes, to share with their group and tell the one word that describes X, or a particular topic.
For example :
Let’s assume you are going to conduct this meeting about office culture.
You can suggest these smaller groups in the meeting to come up with one word to define work culture or office culture.
Once they share the word within, then they further share it with the entire meeting room.
Now the game helps the participant to begin their communication from a very low bar, so they get comfortable.
It is helping the people to take baby steps in the participation in the meeting room.
Pop-Quiz
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Getting people into the right mindset for communication in meetings is the foundation of a successful meeting.
If the meeting participants aren’t aligned with their vision and synchronized to communicate well, nothing productive is going to be out in the meeting.
So for that, you need some kind of ice-breaker activity or game in your meeting to warm up.
Pop-quiz can be a great way to introduce the new people in the team or new team members to each other.
Quiz makes things light and fun, and it becomes easy to participate as something more relating to them.
Like if the quiz is about some of the classic favorite movies of all time, people can start bonding over it.
They have more connections to develop before you lay grounds for meeting objectives. Pop-quizzes can also be about the company or the project.
Problem-Solution Game
This is more like an activity than a game where everyone in the team will have 10 minutes to pick the biggest issues they see in the office.
They have come up with instant solutions for these problems, and can be creative and unique about their approaches too.
Such interaction will allow everyone to get involved in the office culture and practice creative thinking, problem-solving, and team building as well.
They also get their own space to be volunteers and leaders and offer solutions. Such kind of interaction not just breaks the ice but also reflects so much about the employees and their skills.
However, make sure you make this a light activity, not very intense and serious as it might make people hesitant about their approach.
Virtual Movie Club
Movie clubs are an exclusive way to connect with each other through a common interest.
On a virtual experience, employees can share their movie experience.
It can be movie of the month, or just talk about the work of a particular filmmaker or talk about their favourite movies ever.
This game helps employees to open up and interact with each other freely. The meeting is supposed to be fun and highly interactive.
You can take it one step forward and ask your employees to dress up as their favourite movie character and also talk about why they love the character.
Guess Who
Guess Who is a great way to break the ice between your team. It allows you to learn about each person in the room.
It is the perfect ice-breaker game that works best for a group of including 1 to 3 employees.
You can create different breakout groups if you have a larger group to modify accordingly.
Before starting the meeting for this ice-breaker game, you need to use an open-ended survey.
Send an email asking about your employee ice-breaker questions such as the following :
- What is the craziest hairstyle or hair color you have ever tried?
- What was the last song you have heard?
- What was your first job?
- What did you want to become when you were a child?
- If you wanted to visit anywhere in the world, where would you want to go?
- What was the last movie you’ve watched?
- What was the last thing you searched on Google?
You can get a facilitator that helps in creating responses one-by-one where your employees will be guessing the responses.
The application allows you to use the poll to have employees guessing the given question.
The Movie Pitch Game
This is such a creative game to open up your team participants and new members to each other.
You are supposed to split people into different small groups where everyone has to come up with a movie they want to make.
So every team needs to create a short pitch prepared in just 10 minutes and pitch them to everyone.
All the attendees, either virtually or in-person meeting will vote for the best pitch made in the meeting that deserves “funding”.
The game is made to do a lot of conversation, creativity, and exchange of ideas between the people in smaller groups.
It is the perfect fun and unique game to play an ice breaker in your meetings, especially if you have creative people or movie geeks in your office.
Would You Rather
Would You Rather is a classic game popularly played in summer camps, office parties, and almost everywhere.
This one is a quick ice-breaker game for a group of people to get to know each other very easily.
You can start your office meetings or team introductions from the “Would you rather” game questions.
Also, it doesn’t take much time but I have a lot of fun doing it.
It is about asking questions to the participant about choosing one of the available given options where both are bizarre.
You can expect some laughs and informal conversation to get your new team members to open up and get comfortable with each other.
Here are a few “Would you rather” question examples :
- Would you rather go for a hike or see a movie?
- Would you rather want a superpower to fly or get invisibility?
- Would you rather have a horrible short-term memory or very bad long-term memory?
Guess Whose Desk?
As the name suggests very specifically, the game is about guessing the co-worker’s workspaces or desk by looking at the picture.
This doesn’t only break the ice between the team members that have been together for a while but haven’t really bonded or conversed much but also for improving their relationship.
It tells co-workers how much they know about their colleagues. This is a fun virtual game to play with your team.
On the other side, this comes across quite as a blend of “guess who” game and house tour activity.
It is very easy to organize as you first collect all the desk pictures of their home from all employees and use them as a poll on virtual gaming sessions.
Fun Questions
If you want to start your meetings, introductions, or gathering on a lighter note without all the awkwardness and long pauses, this is the way.
All you have to do is put together a list of fun questions. These questions can be anything about favorites, preferences, what-ifs, and other fun stuff.
The purpose of these questions is to make answering so easy and comfortable so all the team participants get used to talking.
These questions can be like these :
- Who will be the one person you want to meet from history?
- If you could be an animal, what would you be and why?
- If you could choose one superpower what would you choose, and why?
- Which celebrity would you love to go with for dinner?
- If you are going to be stranded in a desert, what are the only three things you will bring there to take with you?
And you can come up with a lot of these.
What these questions will do is :
- Help breaking the ice in the room amongst all the new people
- Get everyone in a comfort zone of making conversation
- It will encourage conversation on topics that are usually reserved in the office, so the bonding will be much stronger.
- It helps coworkers get into a much more creative and expressive mindset.
- It will allow you to make participants everyone in the team even the ones who usually won’t or aren’t much into it.
- It will evoke conversations through which everyone starts to know things about each other.
It’s So Bad It’s Good
One of the best things to connect people is movies. Everyone loves to watch a good movie but sometimes, the bad one is so much fun to watch.
You know those movies which are so bad that it’s even more good and become this ridiculous fun gag to watch.
Well, there are just so many of them.
So it is such a great way to hang together and make fun of bad movies. This is more like an anti intellectual movie club discussion of great movies.
So tell your team to find out the worst movies they ever watched. Set up a time to get together over a drink, beverages and snacks.
Now, everyone can engage themselves in talking about the worst movies they watched, and share what was the worst about it.
Group Mad Libs
The Group Mad Libs is a fill-in-the-blank story that makes the ice-breaking game to play amongst your employees.
Fill in the blanks story can lead to quite an hilarious final product as this game proves to be a great ice-breaker for employees to loosen up.
The best part of this ice-breaker game is it can be played in any size group because it requires your employees to partner up.
In case you have an odd number of employees ending with one left, you can pair him or her up with your facilitator or even have one group with three employees in the team.
Before the meeting gets started, you need a story you want to use in the game.
You can use any famous bedtime story or children’ story, some popular fable or even your own company brand story or mission statment.
Employees are supposed to partner up where one will be the reader and the other one will be the writer.
In the groups, readers are supposed to ask the writer to get one word that is a noun, adjective or adverb depending upon the blank space type.
Each time are suppose to fill out their story and they will be given points according to that for winnner to decide.
Solve A Murder Game
There are plenty of “solve murder mystery” games are out there you can play with your co-workers.
You get a game facilitator to coordinate the game virtually, especially if you have a large meeting room.
The best part is, these games are available for both physical and virtual spaces to help to break the ice amongst the team members.
Since such games are highly interactive and to find the solution, everyone needs to get together, suggest potential solutions before solving the murder.
It is not just a great ice-breaker game but also a good team-building exercise for both virtual and physical workspaces.
The Foodie Icebreaker
Food is that one common ground that everyone shares makes it a perfect way to break the ice between the team participants.
After, an ice-breaker has to be something that everyone relates to or easy to communicate about.
In fact, people love to talk about the food, some even are passionate about eating or making as well.
You can come up with different ideas related to food to ask each other. It can be talking about :
- What are their favourite all-time restaurants?
- What was the last meal they enjoyed like anything else?
- Discussing the favorite dishes of every team member
- Sharing food stories
- Talking about the recipes and what they can make for the team
Corporate Spirit Week
The corporate spirit week is pretty much like what you must have used to do in schools.
It was a day of excitement about getting all dressed up and coming in the best outfit for the day.
Well, something you can do the same for the remote teams as well.
And this is definitely going to start so many conversations and spark interaction between the employees on a fun level to establish a connection.
What to do is encourage your management team to hold a meeting which is more theme-oriented.
The themes can be anything fun, pop-culture related and must be something everyone can relate to.
You need to ask the employees to submit their best pictures of their spirit day outfits.
The best selected outfits in the spirit week will be declared as winners. There are plenty of spirit week theme ideas such as :
- Your favourite movie character
- Beach day
- 80s day
- Animal day
- Your favourite superhero
- Coporate colors day
- Fairy tale day
Failure Of The Month
Sharing brings people together, and that applies to all good, and bad stuff as well.
To really make people break their barriers and communicate even more freely, it is important they are able to share their failures too.
This game is quite a fun and interesting virtual game to play with your team members and co-workers.
It is quite helpful and almost like therapy if you address your failures and register them with other people.
And especially to learn that everyone fails in something, so it makes you feel okay and even work harder for it.
In the game, everyone is encouraged to share the things that didn’t work out or completed or didn’t go well in the last month.
This is certainly a great ice-breaker exercise for the relatively new formation of teams but also a perfect game for team bonding.
Sell It
If you have just established a new group or assimilated a new team, ‘Sell it’ is the best game, and quite fun to break the ice.
Even if your team is not in sales, it is still a fun game to play. The game works for all kinds of group sizes.
You have to break employees off into different small groups including 5 to 6 employees. It is a perfect virtual game to play online with not much preparation.
When you start the game, the facilitator or mediator has to ask every employee to grab any item from the desk.
But you don’t have to tell them why they have to pick those items. If they ask, just tell them they will find out soon.
Once, everyone got an item from the desk in their hand,now tell them they are going to try to sell these items to other members.
They set the price and have only a minute to deliver their sales pitch and also answer one question.
Virtual Book Club
Book clubs are great to interact and engage with each other in much more depth.
And since people are quite passionate about the books, they are keen to share about it with others.
It is one of the great topics to bond over as everyone can have their safe space to talk about and connect easily.
Book clubs allow participants to interact with each other in much more inclusive and in-depth conversations that are productive and creative in different ways.
You can allow the book club members to choose the book of the month and read it a few times.
Then it can be discussed throughout the session where everyone will share their reading experience and opinion on the books.
Not just a great ice-breaker game but also an effective way to develop thought leaders in the team.
25 Fun Games To Play On Zoom
So you’re all set to play games with your office pals on Zoom? Or maybe you are just giving it a thought, after all, it has been a while.
It is good that you want to strengthen your bonds with your co-workers or office friends.
You might be looking for some Zoom games for your team to play on the celebration event of completing the recent milestone.
Or it can be just a celebration or fun evening you and your co-employees are planning.
No matter what the reason is, or the event is, there is always a way to have fun if you are really keen on it.
Guess Who?
Do you remember those famously known Christmas Day games where you need to put celebrity names on post-it notes, stick it on someone’s head?
Then other guys have to guess who the celebrity is?
That “Guess Who” game or as we popularly know it “Name in the bag” game wasn’t only fun for Christmas.
If you and your remote team members have just made the plan for the Zoom milestone celebration call or maybe even Friday night hangout online, this is a totally fun game to play.
On Zoom, to play this game you have to give a celebrity to a particular player. Don’t allow this player to see which celebrity you have chosen for him or her.
They have to keep making guesses. You can definitely make this more interesting and exciting by adding some fun rules, like some punishment for not guessing.
It is a perfect game for making people comfortable with each other as well.
Lightning Scavenger Hunts
So here’s how you play Lightning Scavenger Hunts!
You make a list of all the items or characteristics and challenge your co-workers on a Zoom call to collect all those items and show them on the screen to others.
Every time they get successful to cross off things on these lists, they will get a point.
Image Source: Youtube
The person who gathered the item also has to share the stories about the item, anything related to it, and how he or she managed to do it.
This is actually a pretty creative and fun game that can go where you can take it.
These items, characters, or tasks can be like this :
- Show a photo of your furry friend
- Your favorite Mug
- A book you didn’t enjoy at all
- Show something weird
- Show what’s in your pockets right now
- Get the oldest photograph of yourself
- Show outside of your house
It completely depends upon you and your team how crazy they want to go with this game.
Don’t hesitate to discuss earlier things with all of your colleagues and get to the fact of how you want to go with the game.
The more weird, obscure, and crazy the objects will be, the better the game will get to play and even funny stories about it.
Never Have I Ever
It is so unlikely that you haven’t heard about this classic drinking game played at parties and gatherings.
Well, this can be also played on Zoom making it a Zoom Happy Hour with your colleagues.
Every participant gets their turns to say “ Never Have I ever” and then say something they have never done before.
So if other participants have done this, they will have to take a sip of their drink.
The game gets more fun and crazy as its progress, and lets you know about the other team players and about each other so much.
It is also a great bonding game to break the ice between the team members, especially if they are new or something.
You can also play the non-drinking version of the game by just simply using your hand gesture or use other non-alcohol drinks if that is preferred.
The Trip
The famous 100 Point Challenge is behind the creation of this fascinating puzzle game that is already quite popular amongst remote working team cultures.
It starts from this one master puzzle and then leads to further ten different smaller tricky problems to solve.
There are all sorts of visual problems, riddles, number games, problem-solving stuff and word puzzles.
The mix is so great that you won’t be bored! This is the perfect way to test your co-workers who often boast about how smart they are.
The Trip already offers their facilitated game known for the virtual work events and meetings run by external facilitators.
They also help you with the game on how to play this and take care of the rest of the boring stuff regarding it.
This game can include 6 to 200 people at one time using different facilitators.
There you can also get a self-facilitated version of the game where someone from your group or office needs to take the charge.
Virtual Escape Room Challenge
This is really exciting! And one of the most fun games you can play online with your office co-workers and friends.
Image Soure: TSA
The game challenges your team to get out of a virtual house in under 60 minutes, preferably play on Zoom conference call.
If you know about Escape room challenges, you would be really excited about this. The situations created in the games feel quite real and challenging.
You need to find a prison escape or get some clue from a room or even recover a stolen painting while you are on this adventure.
Image Source: TSA
So, mind that, this escape room tour is real, not pictures or animated games. In fact, it is in real-time as one of their guides will be present at the escape room with a live camera.
You’all will be playing the game through his/her camera’s perspective.
You will decide a particular time slot on the game website where your team and the guide both will start this adventure.
Guess the movie
This will be even more fun if you got movie buffs in your office. Totally crushing game for nerds and movie snobs.
To begin this game, you have to curate a playlist on Youtube with all the different movie scenes.
Use these clips to play those movie scenes without revealing the name of the visual, just the sound, and let participants guess the name of the movie.
You can ask the participants to guess the movie name in the chat option. Whosoever guesses the right name first will win the round.
Play as many rounds as you want and at the end of the game, the person with the highest points will win.
Karaoke Nights
This might not be a usual game played on a Zoom call but it can be extremely fun, especially if you have too many bathroom singers in your office team.
All you have to do is go to Youtube where you can find hundreds of Karaoke songs, get a Bluetooth mic and start the battle.
This can be a great musical celebration to make for milestone success, birthday celebration, or any other fun gatherings.
Psych
Psych is a highly interactive, fun, and engaging game for you and your co-workers. It is basically a mobile application developed by The Ellen show.
And it is described as “ where you make up fake answers to real trivia”. This game is even more fun with your co-workers, especially if you know each other well.
It needs to include a minimum of 3 people, and is actually meant to be an in-person game but definitely can be played over a Zoom conference call as well.
Image Source: GP
This can turn into a laugh riot on your zoom calls with your office friends and co-workers.
The app throws a statement that is related to one member for which you and other members will create an answer privately.
For Example, You can get questions like “What is the most annoying habit of ‘John Peterson’?”
Beware, this game is definitely not for sensitive people. You have to get into the zone and not get offended because that will spoil it.
So you can say this game is for teams who already have a great connection between them, like friends.
Mystery Singer
Do you know the game called ‘ The Masked Singer’? If you do, this is quite similar to that game.
To play this game on Zoom, all the participants have to turn off their video along with putting an alias as their name.
Each of the game participants gets to cover one minute of a song. At the end of each round, audience members get to vote for their favorite singer using the Zoom polling feature.
The last in the row will be eliminated from the game.
Then, you can ask the audience to guess who is the singer that survived the last round.
Pub Zoom Quiz
This is a fun office game for quizmasters where teams can play weekly virtual pub quizzes on Zoom conference video calls.
It is known as one of the most popular games played on Zoom as it is quite easy to arrange and start.
You can create different questions under different rounds that include quizzes on all kinds of topics.
Image Source: FR
It can be general knowledge or current affairs. One of the most fun to do is emoji spells based on films where one has to guess the name using the emoji spellings.
Quiz also can be about identifying close-up photos of celebrities, tell the difference between pictures, guess the music intros and so much more.
You can take the game to another level by using the whiteboard functionality that Zoom offers for the picture-style rounds.
There are multiple quiz packs and ideas on the internet you can get or buy as well for your teams.
What is suggested is to print out all the answers to the quiz in advance if you are hosting the game.
Zoom Charades
Charades is already one of the most commonly played and popular games played at parties and gatherings.
That works on Zoom video calls too, and very well actually!
You can use different random charades generators to find a word every time to act upon in front of the camera.
Since you have the Zoom features to mute a person and Charades need the acting participant not to use spoken words, it goes even better.
You just have to mute the participant whose turn is to act out the word and others need to guess.
You can split all the players into two different teams. More right guesses on any side will make the team win over others.
Jackbox
Jackbox games make remote gaming and fun activities on steroids. They have all kinds of games packed into one box with everything all set to go with.
Image Source: TSA
The best part is to get variety in gaming for the Zoom so you and your office pals won’t have to play one game too long.
They have all sorts of fun games such as drawing games, bluffing games, sound effects, trivia games, quizzes, fill in the blank and so much more.
These games are also specifically designed for office parties or such gatherings. One of their top games that you can play on Zoom is Fibbage.
It is quite like Pysch! Here a person has to secretly share the truth to a particular answer whereas others create believable lies.
Image Source: TSA
Whosoever finds the truth by fooling others will get points and more bonus points for making others laugh.
Then, there are other games such as Quiplash where it will throw a statement and players have to reply with a witty answer.
The answers that get the most votes win points.
Desert Island Intelligences
Now, this is something exciting and quite new to play along with your office mates on a Zoom video call.
You might have heard about the theory of multiple intelligences from Gardner. It speaks about people having these different strengths and abilities known as ‘intelligence.
So here are eight bits of intelligence Gardner states :
- Linguistic-verbal
- Logical-mathematical
- Musical
- Visual-spatial
- Intrapersonal
- Interpersonal
- Body-kinetic
- Naturalistic
This game online called Desert Island Intellegnces adapt this theory turning into one of the highly interactive team-building fun games for office players.
Here eight different individuals representing eight different bits of intelligence are pitted against a desert island to survive in limited resources.
Players in the game have to vote one intelligence at every particular situation depending upon how useful one will be at the moment.
So this ‘usefulness is quite a vague term to decide and that creates a discussion amongst the team members
This game actually develops more connections between the teams and helps them build stronger bonds as well.
Tagvenue Virtual Social
Tagvenue Virtual Social is a game where you get a pro host to take care of the event where you and your team will enjoy the festivities and gathering.
You and your team can just sit back, enjoy the drink and unwind with your coworkers on Zoom video call.
This is a perfect game for participants from 2 to even more than 30 people where the prices for their plan differ.
Here you can hang out with your team members, play some online games, and just talk over drinks and do all the available activities and games in the package.
Online Office Games
This is a series of all the competitive, engaging and fun games, challenges, and activities that can be played on Zoom.
So basically, you are getting all the online games made for teams and office employees in one place.
You can get this event registered for your team which goes for 90 minutes facialized by world-class hosts.
All the games are handpicked and optimized to achieve a higher level of engagement, fun, and team-building amongst the players.
Since you don’t have to prepare for the game or host it, it makes so much to just get a date for the event and meet for the day to have some fun.
Some Zoom Tips To Make Your Experience Better
- Send everyone the invite link of the Zoom meeting video conference and make sure they have received it.
- It is always better to keep the audio off unless one is speaking.
- Keeping audio off when you are not speaking, at least for a while, prevents others from listening to natural bodily noise like sniffing, gulping drinks, etc.
- You can use the ‘chat’ to get a column in your window where you can type anything public to the group or privately to the person.
- Use the ‘choose virtual background’ option to create a custom virtual background behind you to make your video calls more fun.
- If you wish to leave the meeting for some time or just temporarily, you can hit the ‘stop’ video button next to the audio and join again later.
- Use the ‘share screen’ option to remotely share your screen with the group. It can be to show anything to the team or see something funny.
- Make sure you have a paid version of Zoom if you want to continue the interaction for more than 40 minutes.
More To Explore:
- 40 Fun Games To Play In Offices To Promote Teamwork
- 50 Virtual Team Building Activities For Small Businesses
- 15 Online Games To Play With Coworkers
- 30+ Online Games To Play At Work: Boost Your Productivity
- 25+ Virtual Employee Appreciation Ideas For 2023
“Vision, strategy, and inspiration – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of “TheLeaderboy” dedicated to leadership and personal development. As a self-taught practitioner, I have been studying the principles of effective leadership for the past decade and my passion lies in sharing my insights with others. My mission is to empower individuals to become better leader