Virtual meetings can be challenging to facilitate. It’s important to handle the “ice” that is present at the start of a meeting. How can you get your virtual meeting off to a good start, set the proper tone and promote conversation? Ice breakers! Here we look at ice breakers that provide quick and engaging ways to set the tone at the start of your virtual meeting.
As a program manager or project manager, you are responsible for setting the tone and flow of your meetings. Your goal is for all stakeholders to participate actively and engage so that your meeting provides for a productive discussion.
Virtual meetings can be challenging to facilitate and get started. And that is because it is easy for participants to get distracted and disengaged.
It’s important that you handle the “ice” that is present at the start of a meeting. Many times, how a meeting is started will determine how well people will be compelled to engage during your virtual meeting.
So, how can you get your virtual meeting off to a good start? How can you set the proper tone and promote conversation during your virtual project performance reviews and strategy meetings?
Ice breakers!
Ice breakers can help you shake things up and create quick connections at the start or during your meeting. They can also help you generate engaging conversations and spark up brainstorming sessions with and among the project’s stakeholders.
There are various types of ice breaker methods! You can use questions, project stories, or simple exercises.
Here we look at ice breaker questions and activities that will provide quick and engaging ways to set the tone at the start of your meeting.
Hybrid Project Meetings
Here are some ice breaker questions that you could attempt at your next all-virtual or hybrid (meetings that have in-person and virtual attendees) meeting.
Ice Breaker Questions for Hybrid Meetings
- What would you do at work if you knew you couldn’t fail?
- Which gives you more energy: starting big projects or finishing up all the details? Why?
- Name 3 things that you and your team have in common.
- Who in the company would you like to learn from? What would you like to learn?
- What fictitious character best represents you and why?
- What’s one thing you’ve learned from your team? What does it mean to you?
- Describe the last project you worked on, like you would describe the weather? Sunny?
- How might we learn from each other more often?
- What book would benefit the project team if we read it together?
- What would you rather hear first, good news or bad news?
- What’s one thing about the project/program you’ve learned in the past month?
Team-Building Ice Breaker Activities for Hybrid Meetings
- Group Storytelling: You can ask everyone to share their part of the project on a slideshow.
- Simulated Problems: Create a fictional scenario that the team might face later on in the project. Then ask them to strategize together to come up with a solution.
- Future Headline: Ask each person to write a magazine or newspaper headline about the project in the future.
Remote Project Meetings
Has your office just recently transitioned to 100% work-from-home status? Do you collaborate with the project’s stakeholders remotely a majority of the time? Test out these thought-provoking ice breakers for your next virtual project meeting.
Virtual Ice Breaker Questions for Projects with Remote Stakeholders
- Have you travelled for work recently? Where did you go?
- What’s your favorite virtual meeting platform and why?
- What web-based project tool do you use often at work and can’t live without?
- What do you miss most about the office?
- What’s one time where a program team took a risk, and it paid off?
- How have you been able to stay productive working from home?
- Where are you joining us from?
- What is the most exciting industry-relevant article you have read of late and why?
- What is your number one work-from-home productivity tip?
- If you could change one aspect of your remote workspace, what would it be?
- What criteria helps you decide whether to say “no” to something or commit to it?
- What makes a virtual workplace presentation compelling to you?
Virtual Ice Breaker Activities for Program Meetings with Remote Stakeholders
- Share a Picture: You can ask the group to share a recent picture of themselves or share a picture of their work desk. You can create a guessing game during this activity. Say you ask them to share a photo of when they were younger or of their workspace, and then invite others to guess who is in the picture or whose workspace it is.
- Build a birth map: Create a collaborative map in Google Maps and, before the meeting, ask everyone to drop a pin where they were born. Then, during the meeting, you can ask people to share something about where they were born.
- Use chatstorms on Zoom: Use the chat to create a storm of responses in your meeting to increase engagement.
- Zoom background challenge: Ask your group to share their virtual backgrounds at the start of the meeting. To turn it up a notch, ask everyone to come with a themed virtual background, like their favorite vacation spot, or a scene from their favorite TV show or movie.
- Create art together: You can share a whiteboard with everyone, using an online platform like Mural or Miro, and ask them to draw. It may be to draw a picture of how they are feeling about their part of the project or even something a little more informal, like their pets.
Whether you are hosting a kick-off meeting for a new program or a regional stakeholder meeting in which participants are meeting for the first time to work collectively on an initiative, include an ice breaker (or two!) that is industry-appropriate to improve the effectiveness of your next project meeting.
The team at See In Colors specializes in meeting facilitation, reach out if you need help with your next project meeting!
Lisa
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