Icebreaker activities for Microsoft Teams meetings

With more and more people working remotely, online meetings have become the norm. Not only are meetings run online but more and more training, workshops and conferences are being held virtually as well.

Sometimes there is a need to spark friendly, informal interactions to help people to get to know each other or encourage participants to get focused and involved. In such situations a small interactive activity can help to remove barriers between remote team members and create a more open and connected environment.

In this article we will share some ideas about icebreaker activities that can be run on Microsoft Teams and don’t require any third-party applications.

Choose your favourite

Ask participants to navigate to the meeting chat, open the emoji menu and select the food section (a pizza slice).

Now instruct everyone to pick their favourite beverage from the available icons and send it to the chat.

Instead of a beverage you can ask participants to share their favourite sport or an animal they associate themselves with.

This icebreaker is great for getting everyone engaged and only takes a few minutes to run. We typically do icebreaker activities at the beginning of a meeting to encourage participants to be more active during the session.

Good for meetings with a small number of participants.

Hunt

Similarly, this icebreaker involves emojis. But instead of instructing participants where to go, you ask them to find a particular icon. You can either show them a picture or describe what it looks like.

Tip: don’t pick obvious icons (e.g. a tennis ball) as there is an emoji search function; choose one that is difficult to find by keywords.

To motivate participants, announce some incentives for the first person who finds the answer and sends it to the chat. The incentive could be a real thing, such as a digital gift card, or as simple as a praise in Microsoft Teams.

This activity may require a little longer to run but is a good way to involve participants and get their attention and focus. Depending on time availability you can run a few games with different icons.

Can be used for meetings with a large or small number of participants.

True or false

Prepare a question that can be answered true or false.

Using Microsoft forms to quickly post it to the meeting chat. You can share results with participants as soon as they submit their answer and announce the right answer when the voting is complete.

Be creative about questions – it can be just a general question or more specific to your company, theme of the meeting, or even about yourself.

This activity requires a little more preparation in advance, but the advantage is that most people will be familiar with this format of a game and will actively participate.

Can be used for meetings with a large or small number of participants.

Conclusion

These are some examples of icebreakers that you can try out for your next meeting. Or perhaps you will make it a tradition to kick off each meeting with a little social activity to add a more personal connection to your virtual collaboration.