Does anyone else hate ice breakers in meetings?

[asblindasabat]

I bloody hate them. Sometimes I just don’t know how to answer them. For example, “what are your dislikes?” - I can’t think of anything appropriate to respond to that in a professional environment - saying I dislike fake people probably wouldn’t look to good!

I also hate “what are your favourite movies?” - I don’t really watch movies so I couldn’t tell you the names of most of them and it really makes me look boring!

anyone else just hate them?

I agree with @Kanaloa .
Whether it is a work meeting, a training course, or a meeting of students at University, it is a waste of time going round the whole room asking everyone to give some irrelevant information. It becomes infuriating when you have had to make complex arrangements just to get there on time, or when you know you have a massive backlog of work piling up.
Just start the information give.
Then, during the meeting you can break into smaller groups and you have the meeting content to talk about or can choose to ask a couple of get to know you questions in 4s or 5s and not have to sit though 24 answers as they go round the room.

I hate them with a passion. Apart from the 2 truths and lie one. I amuse myself by saying,
I love animals
I love chocolate
I love ice breaker exercises

I'm a facilitator and in the process of thinking up a new ice breaker for an event in november. You lot have given me lots of ideas! .

I hate them. I usually try to think of the most inappropriate answers and then chicken out of saying them and panic about finding something acceptable to say.

Like pp, it annoys me that time is wasted especially when I've rushed to get there on time and then the first 30-45 minutes are spent playing stupid games. All it does is put me in a bad mood and a negative mindset. I'd rather "get to know everyone" over a coffee like a normal person. Why do we need to be forced to make new friends anyway? Just get on with the subject matter and if necessary, we can talk about it with the other strangers in the room.

Like facilitate giving the icebreaker a miss! 👍

Truth & lie is a special kind of hell. It's not fun.

I lie in icebreakers too. Partly because I object to giving personal details to colleagues, but mainly because it relieves the tedium and amuses me to make up vaguely plausible answers.

Good Lord. I'd no idea grownups actually did this sort of thing.

In my company we very occasionally do a round of introductions if we've got a new team member. No personal stuff, no silly questions. Just who we are, what we do, where we are located - relevant info. We've got plenty of actual work to talk about.

As part of my PhD I am a teaching assistant to undergrads and in the first session I always ask if they're ready for the icebreakers - the look of fear on their faces 🤣 and the relief when I say I'm joking and wouldn't do that to them as I detest being made to do them! I find that breaks the ice more effectively than making them spend 20mins waiting anxiously to move on to the actual content of the lecture!

We had something like this. The question was ‘what animal would you not eat?’ The head of the trading floor said cat and before I knew what was coming out of my mouth I shot back ‘No wonder your wife divorced you!’

We haven’t had another since. Head of trading gave me a 5* review at year end and said I was quick to cut through the fluff.

Love them or let loathe them, they work! If you get everyone in the room to say something in the first 10 minutes - even if it's something stupid, or they hate it or its really cringy, they are much more likely to participate during the rest of the workshop. It means everyone has already been out of their comfort zone and so don't feel shy anymore. I know they're awkward but they do make a difference.

Hate ice breakers, I suffer with social anxiety anyway, so being in a room with other people in a work environment who I don’t know that well or strangers is already stressful, this adds to my anxiety tenfold. I would rather ice breakers weren’t the norm.

🤣

Awful things. Ice breakers at team building activities led by annoying people. Days out my life completely wasted. I just want to get on with my actual work and then go home.

I think if you refuse to join in then you are just drawing more attention to yourself as someone who likes to make out they are 'a bit special'. We have a team member who refuses to join in ... he then never contributes to any discussions or other projects ... in a customer focussed industry I honestly wonder why he doesn't just look for a different job.
I just go along with them now, I am by far the oldest on our team so don't relate to much of the 'banter' but I can usually make something up.

Yes I hate them too.
I once had to host a meeting of internal and external stakeholders. I went with something broad: "Tell us all something interesting about yourself!"
I started us off with "I'm Chowder and I'm currently training for [outing fitness challenge]".
The next person said "I've got two children - 7 and 9" and the next person said "I've got two children - 3 and 7" and the next said "I've got two children - 18 months and 3" and so on around a huge board room table.
It's like every boring grey corporate fucker gave themselves permission to list their kids as their 'interesting thing' and the exercise was doomed! So much so that we got to the final person of about 25 and she said, which made me laugh, "I'm X and I don't have kids!!"

Because you then bond over the horrible experience of the ice breakers

The last one we had was “tell us something interesting about yourself”

there is absolutely fuck all interesting about me.

Just seen the same question a couple before my post! I’ll save that piece of boring information about DCs ages for the next 😂.

Nobody gives a shit what anyone's dislikes or movies are (which is why ice breakers are so stupid). Plus everyone's too busy working out their own clever answer to listen to yours. Just make up some crap, everyone will have forgotten it 30 seconds later.

Sound of Music and spiders. There you go.

Unfortunately that’s true so people go along with it through gritted teeth hating every minute of it which is awful really.
I tend to say my piece about it in the feedback questionnaire at the end in the hope one day someone will listen.

Having done a million of these things and seen so little point in the ice breaker, can I reframe your thinking that these are necessary?

What purpose do you think they serve or what are you trying to achieve?

Total nonsense. In my experience people who don’t/won’t contribute to a discussion has zero correlation to whether there was an ice breaker or not m, or how shot it was.

Now THAT is the role of a good facilitator, to get everyone to contribute to meaningful discussion, not planning ice breakers.

It's like these forced fun events we sometimes have to go on. Have so much work I should be doing I have no interest in writing a song with people I'll never see again 🙄

We did an icebreaker at our very small company a few years back.

Small home counties company all from local area. We all knew each other reasonably well to say hello to at least and the most recent hire at the time was a lovely man from Argentina... this is relevant... to do some whizzy data stuff. His spoken English wasn't great but no matter given his job and he was lots of fun

We were asked to write a 'fun fact' about ourselves on a sticker (still with backing on) put it in a pot and we each had to pick one and find the person it referred to by asking no more than two questions, the answer to which must be 'yes or no' but couldn't be related directly to the answer if you see what I mean. Once you found the person you stuck the sticker on them in triumph.

I got "I like to make the cooking of the foods".

I had to spend ages pretending to ask Sue in Accounts and John from the customer team if they took a particular interest in recipes so as not to make me look like a massive racist....

Anyway unbeknownst to me the last to find the owner of the sticker was to do a forfeit. I had covered my tracks so well I was the bloody last so I had to read out the 'clue' and everyone looked at me like and I was berated for the rest of the day for being a clueless idiot given it was so obvious.