Icebreakers: 30 of the best questions to break the ice in a virtual meeting

In virtual and remote meetings, the start of the meeting can seem like the silent party game Keeper of the Keys, where each participant tries to stay as quiet as possible. To inject some energy into your virtual team meetings you need a strategy. For this purpose, icebreakers for virtual meetings are a great ally!

Online, just as in person, to break the ice and get to know each other, there is nothing better than a few great icebreaker questions, an icebreaker activity, or an icebreaker game. Without handshakes or other non-verbal, in-person communications, it can be difficult at a virtual meeting to connect teams on a human level, and through a computer screen. Ice breakers are therefore a great way to make connections between team members or employees in a work group.

Here we will list 30 of the best, fun and effective ice breaker questions to help make your virtual meetings more friendly and dynamic, and your remote teams and online work groups better connected right from the start!

Good practices for breaking the ice online

30 icebreaker questions for online meetings

Personal icebreaker questions to get to know each other

Icebreaker questions about remote working

Icebreaker questions for remote team building

Icebreaker questions to lighten the mood

Games and activities to break the ice remotely

Who owns this office?

Background Competition

Wikipedia Race

The best techniques for virtual icebreakers

The goal of the icebreaker

Choosing specific icebreakers

Vary your icebreaker activities

Good practices for breaking the ice online

No more impersonal, boring or tense virtual meetings. Thanks to Wooclap’s tools, you can create effective icebreaker activities or games for your work meetings, training and team building sessions and virtual onboardings.

But, first of all, what exactly is an ice breaker? An icebreaker is a fun group activity or game with the goal of relaxing people and creating a pleasant and productive environment for them to share thoughts, chat and have open discussions and exchanges.

In a virtual meeting, remote work group session or team Zoom call, ice breakers can take many forms:

• Brainstorming, to stimulate gray matter, and begin to come up with ideas
• Word clouds, to begin to openly share opinions and ideas
• Polls, to get instant feedback from the team
• Quizzes, with open-ended questions, or multiple choice questions, as a fun way to test knowledge
• Games, which get groups working together on a common task, or competing against each other in a friendly way

Wooclap’s “Find on image” activity gets team members to interact between themselves on a shared image. For example, an excellent icebreaker for international students and visual exercise that brings people, such as international colleagues, together as a group, despite the distance, is to ask them simply to mark their location on a map, and then begin to chat and share their personal story.

30 icebreaker questions for online meetings

Ideal for breaking the ice, open-ended questions encourage dialog and allow each person to express themselves freely. More talk, more exchange, and a better virtual meeting! Here we will give you some of our favorite virtual icebreaker questions:

Personal icebreaker questions to get to know each other

These questions are a great way to start to learn things about your team, virtual meeting participants or work group and to create a climate of complicity:

1. What is your favorite movie?
2. What is your fondest vacation memory?
3. Do you have a passion that motivates you especially (apart from work)?
4. What would you like to say to the you of 10 years ago? And about the you 10 years from now?
5. Tell us something people don’t know about you. Surprise us!
6. What is the best book you have ever read, and why?
7. What's the most interesting question you've ever been asked about yourself?

Icebreaker questions about remote working

People can either find remote work great and easy, or challenging and lonely. Here are some questions to get your work group or team to start to share things that make remote work and managing remote teams easier and more rewarding:

1. What is your ideal remote work environment?
2. What routines or habits have you adopted for working remotely?
3. Do you have a favorite drink you like to sip while you are working from home?
4. Do you think remote work is a more fun way of working?
5. Do you have any special techniques for concentrating while working from home?
6. What's the strangest place you've ever worked from remotely?
7. Can you guess what the biggest trend in remote work will be in the next decade?
8. Can you share a time when you had to give a virtual online presentation to a group of people who were not at all interested in the topic?

Icebreaker questions for remote team building

Teams don’t build themselves, they need to work at it, share ideas and thoughts, be more open, be able to read the emotions of others, have a common shared story, and feel like they can ask questions and help from each other. Here is a list of some of our favorite team building icebreakers:

1. What remote work advice might you give to your colleagues?
2. What unsolicited help might you like to receive from a remote teammate?
3. If you could swap remote work locations with anyone here, who would it be, and why?
4. What do you admire most about how the team and its members work?
5. Let’s imagine that we are a team of superheroes: what role would each of you play, and why?
6. What do you think are some of the best practices for building strong relationships with remote team members?
7. Can you share a time when you joined a group activity and immediately felt like you belonged?

Icebreaker questions to lighten the mood

All work and no play makes a team a dull team. Sometimes, there comes a time when you need to lighten the mood of meeting, to get people to open up and share more. Here are some of our favorite more playful questions:

1. What video made you laugh recently?
2. What song do you sing in the shower or while you are doing chores?
3. Do you remember a moment of sheer embarrassment you could tell us about?
4. What is the craziest thing you’ve ever cooked? Or eaten?
5. If you could teleport anywhere just by snapping your fingers, where would you go right now?
6. What's the funniest thing that's happened to you recently?
7. If you could invent a new holiday, what would it be and how would you celebrate it?
8. If you could time travel, would you go to the past or the future?

Games and activities to break the ice remotely

There is no shortage of fun team games and activities to do even remotely. Here is a short list of team building ice breakers to make your virtual meeting more fun and effective.

Who owns this office?

The principle is simple: each person sends the group a photo of their work space. One person is designated the Office Manager, and their role is to select a photo at random and submit it to the group. All the participants will then have to debate who they think the owner of this office is and why.

After a minute or so, the Office Manager must decide whether the participants have guessed correctly, and if they are right, they earn a point. The Office Manager then chooses another person to take their place, and a new round begins.

Background Competition

The majority of videoconferencing software today, just like Zoom, allows you to replace or customize the background behind you. Each of the participants has two minutes to find the funniest, quirkiest or most original background. Then, run a poll to judge the winning background.

This activity encourages the participants to get familiar with the virtual online meeting software and each other at the same time!

Wikipedia Race

Choose a Wikipedia page at random. This will be your common starting point. The goal is then to reach a destination Wikipedia page as quickly as possible, using only Wikipedia’s internal links.

Tip: You can link this activity to your specific team expertise, for example by choosing the “Market Research” page as your destination page if you work in marketing!

The best techniques for virtual icebreakers

The goal of the icebreaker

Before the meeting, it is important to determine the goal you want to achieve through the icebreaker, such as to introduce a new employee, build a climate of trust, boost creativity, etc. You will therefore be able to offer the most suitable activity for your specific team, without losing focus!

Choosing specific icebreakers

The online format of the meeting should help determine your choice of icebreaker. Certain activities lend themselves less to virtual remote online meetings, such as model building games. It’s no secret that a successful icebreaker is one that is ideally suited to the format of the meeting, the size of the team, and the personalities of the employees.

Vary your icebreaker activities

Remote virtual online meetings are becoming more and more popular, and so are icebreaker games and activities. To capture the attention of your team, there’s nothing like a unique, creative and never before experienced activity! The key is to reinvent the icebreaker from time to time.

Take advantage of the countless digital tools available from Wooclap to break the ice at your virtual meeting. There are no limits to creativity!