35 great icebreakers for team building

To strengthen cohesion, integrate newcomers, and gear up for intensive projects, there are many benefits to running a team building day or session. At its core, team building is about organizing a shared activity that strengthens the ties between colleagues, teammates, and office members.

However, getting going can sometimes be complicated, especially if the people in the group feel they do not know each other well to start with! Nothing beats a great icebreaker: whether a simple question, series of questions, game, or activity, a well-chosen ice breaker will immediately help break the ice, relax the general atmosphere, and get people to start to know and relate to each other.

Here are Wooclap’s list of favorites!

Best practices

Examples of icebreaker questions for your team building activity

Games and icebreaker activities for team building: our favorite 5

5 minute (or less) team building icebreakers

Team Icebreaker Questions

Fun and simple icebreaker games of less than 5 minutes

Virtual and hybrid team icebreakers

Fun Icebreaker Questions for team building

Best practices

An icebreaker will help create a convivial atmosphere and a climate of trust and complicity in which participants will start to express themselves freely and get along better. A simple icebreaker question, activity or game will therefore be particularly useful when participants need to exchange ideas and start building strong team cohesion.

For the success of your icebreaker activities or games, make sure you follow these few rules:

• Start with the purpose of your icebreaker: each icebreaker serves a specific purpose, and should be chosen consciously and according to your overall goal. Is it to meet new colleagues? Or to find a moment in time to share and reflect on a specific work activity for a team in which the team members already know each other? Your choice will depend on your specific goal.
• Adapt your icebreaker to the number of participants: the same activity will work very differently for 8 rather than 25 team members. Choose your icebreaker carefully according to the composition of your team or teams. A small group will allow everyone to take turns speaking on a topic, but the same activity for a large group might take up too much time. Therefore, in the case of a large group of participants, you should favor games or group activities, or discussions between pairs of group members.
• Consider the timing of your icebreaker and where you will be: will you be outside, in an office meeting room, or in a virtual meeting? Will you need paper, post-it notes, devices, or equipment such as a projector? Will the activity be in the morning or afternoon? These factors should be taken carefully into account when choosing your icebreaker activity or game to play.
• Make it inclusive. Choose prompts everyone can answer regardless of seniority, background, or whether they're in the room or on a screen. Avoid anything that singles people out or assumes shared references.

Examples of icebreaker questions for your team building activity

• What was the first thing you thought about when you woke up this morning?
• What was your very first job, and what did it teach you?
• If you could instantly master one new skill, what would it be?
• What's one piece of advice from a parent or mentor that you still live by?
• What's a small win you had this week, at work or outside it?
• If you had one extra hour every day, how would you spend it?
• What book, podcast, or show would you recommend to the whole team right now?
• What's one thing you'd like the team to know about how you work best?

For more icebreaker questions, head over to our icebreaker question article!

Games and icebreaker activities for team building: our favorite 5

Two Truths and a Lie

For small groups, approximately 3 minutes per participant

The group is given some time to find 3 things to say about themselves. However, one of things will be completely false! It will then be up to the rest of the group to guess which is the lie (this can, for example, be done by running a quick poll).

Human Bingo

For small or large groups, 10-15 minutes

Bingo cards (created in advance) are distributed to all members of the group or team with statements such as “has already lived abroad”, “is a very good dancer”, etc. Everyone then has to question the other participants to find someone for whom the statement is true. The first person to complete their bingo card wins!

Common Ground

For large groups, 10-15 minutes

Split the group of participants into small teams (of 5 to 10 people): each team must find a set of common points that all of its members share! Such as common traits, interests, strengths, stories, anecdotes, experiences, favorite movie, favorite board game, etc. To end the game, there are two possibilities:

1. The team that finds the greatest number of common points after a set time wins.
2. If time is limited, the first team to find 10 common points wins.

Top 3

For small groups, 10-15 minutes

One of the participants gives a word, theme or category to the group (for example, “top music styles”, “top Indian dishes”, or “top 1980s movies”), and the next person must list three items in that category as quickly as possible, before it’s the following person’s time to take a turn, and so on round the whole group.

The goal is to be spontaneous, and come with some answers that might surprise everyone! This activity is best when everyone in the group can take turns in coming up with a category.

Guess Who?

For small groups

Before the meeting, each person in the group of participants must answer 2 or 3 questions about themselves by email (depending on the desired duration of the icebreaker activity). These might range from “What was the worst nickname you have been given?” to “What is your favorite color?” Then, at the meeting, the facilitator will present the answers to the questions to the group, and the participants must guess the person who came up with each answer.

To project the answers up on a screen, don’t hesitate to use a tool like Wooclap!

5 minute (or less) team building icebreakers

During a team building day or meeting, time is often limited. However, there’s always just enough time to run a short but fun and effective icebreaker! And it’s often far better than not having one at all: those few minutes of an icebreaker are always a great way to help get the ball rolling!

To avoid wasting too much time, simply choose an icebreaker question rather than a game, or a quick activity. We will present a list of a few of the best icebreaker questions to you here below!

Team Icebreaker Questions

• If our team had a theme song, what would it be?
• Who is a person that has inspired you in your work and why?
• What would be the word that best describes our team, and why?
• If our team had to be a group of superheroes or fictional characters, who would we be?
• What’s the best team building activity you have enjoyed in the past?
• What is one of your best memories of your work in the company?

Fun and simple icebreaker games of less than 5 minutes

• Mystery Photo

All the participants of the group must bring a photo of themselves as a child. The photos are collected by the facilitator, who puts them on display. The objective is for the participants to find out who is in each photo!

• Marshmallow Challenge

The participants are divided into small groups of 3 to 5, and each group receives 20 spaghetti, a roll of tape, and a marshmallow. In this fun game, the objective is to build the tallest tower, with the marshmallow at the top, in 5 minutes tops!

• Island Game

The participants are divided into small teams of approximately 5 people. Each team is assigned a mat, which the team can just about all stand on, as if they were standing on a very small island. The goal is to turn the mat over, without falling in the water. The first team to succeed wins!

Discover our article on our favorite icebreakers for your meetings!

Virtual & hybrid team icebreakers

Remote and hybrid teams interact less spontaneously than in-office ones, which makes a deliberate icebreaker even more valuable: it warms people up, gets cameras and voices on, and rebuilds the small talk that distance erases.

These work over video calls and in hybrid rooms alike.

Quick virtual icebreaker questions

• Show us one object within arm's reach that says something about you.
• What's your go-to snack or drink during video calls?
• What's the best, and the worst, part of working remotely for you?
• If you could move your home office anywhere in the world for a week, where would it go?
• What's a remote-work hack you swear by?

Virtual icebreaker games

• Emoji check-in — 2 min. Ask everyone to sum up their week (or their mood) in a single emoji and drop it in the chat or in a live word cloud. Instant read on the room.
• Virtual Two Truths and a Lie — 5–10 min. The classic, run as an online poll so remote teammates vote in one click.
• Online trivia — 10 min. Fire off themed trivia questions and let people compete for the top score with Wooclap's competition mode — a reliable energizer for distributed teams.
• Virtual scavenger hunt — 5 min. Name an item ("something blue," "your favorite mug") and everyone races to grab it and show it on camera.

Fun Icebreaker Questions for team building

• Do you have any hidden talents you would like to share?
• What is the strangest student job or work you have ever done?
• Have you ever met a celebrity, and what was it like meeting them?
• What do you think is the best animal and best name for a team mascot?
• What is your unspoken guilty pleasure?