Ice breakers - I hate them with every fibre of my soul but have been asked to organise two for Friday

[catin8oots]

9 colleagues. 4 new, never met before. All women if that's relevant?

Please help me before I quit my job 😀

How would building a tower under time constraints with strangers be the least painful? That is excrutiating. Can we normalize just saying our names?!

'One girl put her hand up (compared to me was very much a girl!) said that a rap was way out of her comfort zone and very unapologetically said she wasn't going to rap, but just speak like an adult, and hopefully we'd understand. I could have kissed her there and then, and everyone else just read out their reasons.'

I want to give her a hug too! Good for her for saying um, no thanks 👍

Like you I hate ice-breakers with every fibre of my being. But I did once do one I liked. You just had to write down your five favourite films. I presume we then told these to other people, I can't remember it was ages ago. But I liked doing that. Pretty low stress, no pressure, quite fun to think about and everyone has films they like.

I'd do that if I were you.

Bring in a load of ice, hammer, goggles. Tell everyone you've been asked to hold an ice breaker, so assuming they all hate these events as much as you, you've decided it would be more fun to take it literally. Everyone says their name and makes up a stupid fake fact about themselves before hammering some ice. Most ridiculous 'fact' wins.

I've done that fact thing as an icebreaker and I absolutely hated it.

Ask everyone what's the worst icebreaker they've heard of?

Thank God I’m retired!

See I have only read page one but the helpful suggestions are already showing why so many people hate icebreakers. You are all suggesting things that people can succeed or fail at ( such as making something) - which is stressful - or you have to pick something personal you have to share about yourself - which is also stressful ( and can backfire badly - I had a friend who was at such an icebreaker where a young woman doing this exercise wrote that her boyfriend was married 😐)

Not an ice breaker but an ex many years ago had to go to a 'group interview'

Afterwards they had to go into a brightly lit boardroom with no music and pretend they were in a nightclub. Dancing, chatting, pretending to order drinks.

I think I would rather be unemployed for life.

I like that one!

Yeah I would have walked out, without a doubt. Not a job I would have done well in!

Shameless placemark to find out what OP ends up with! Thankfully a long time since I've done one, always hated them

@catin8oots

1. Share your highlight of the year so far.
2. Tell us about something the area you're from is famous for.

For the record, I despise these too, but the above are things I'd be ok talking about.

Another I've been involved in is sending the meeting leader a picture of me as a small child and we had to guess who was who from their childhood pictures.

I would rather do an ice breaker!

Building towers out of spaghetti, cardboard etc is infantile and pointless.

You could just do a check in - pick a theme something like superheroes, cartoon characters, or songs and then ask people to choose one based on how they are feeling today / about the meeting / other relevant context.

Another one is get a jar of pennies, everyone picks one and looks at the year and has to say a specific or favourite memory from that year.

I wouldn't say the marshmallow and spaghetti challenge is an icebreaker - it takes about 25 minutes to do properly and it has a specific value / message. I use it sometimes in training that I do (but I don't do icebreakers anymore 😉)

The best one (I use the term loosely) I ever took part in was a bingo thing - everyone got a bingo card with things on it like 'I own a dog' , 'I can run a mile', 'I travelled here by public transport' etc. We all had to move about the room till we'd filled our bingo card - bar of chocolate for the winner. No-one was put in the spotlight, no-one had to converse beyond 'can you run a mile', it was much better than the usual 'tell everyone an interesting fact about yourself'.

It means you've only got to put up with this sort of crap for 3 minutes, you don't have to stand up in front of everyone or give personal information. Jam 3 straws into a marshmallow to make a pyramid shape and you're done.

Split group into 2. Aim is a race to see which group can get into an ordered line quickest eg alphabetical surname A-Z, last letter of surname Z-A, Last digit of mobile phone 0-9. Prize of a chocolate for each of the winning team.

These are pretty good as they are not personal

My old bosses PA was once asked to do some ice breakers for a team away day. She thought it would be good to have some true facts about team members and also some untrue facts. However some of the untrue ones she came up with were wholly inappropriate. The one I remember most was "I have had #15k of plastic surgery". Enthusiastic team members were left looking people up and down saying yes- you look like you have had a bit of work and one "gentlemen" suggesting to the team that he had always thought my boobs were not quite natural (this really happened). Even then this was inappropriate and I fed back on it. Never happened again.

Cards Against Humanity!

How about a literal ice breaker? Freeze something into the middle of ice cubes and get everyone into teams. Perhaps provide a few items that they can use to melt or break their cubes. First team to get the item out wins, the rest are either shamed publicly or fired on the spot. Or you could just end with a discussion about methods used.

Oh my place of work stopped doing icebreakers well over a decade ago due to introverts and people with social anxiety not turning up or quitting. Forcing people to play games or share information about themselves is a lot of unnecessary pressure and quite unpleasant. Why can people not just introduce themselves?

Double post

No not at all because the purpose is just to get people used to the others quickly and hopefully not too painfully so the sessions aren't horribly stilted. Singling people out or characterising them isn't part of that, unfortunately some people go a bit overboard with icebreakers and do just that.

Of course there are people who choose to opt out and that's OK, sometimes they opt out and at the end volunteer something about themselves or have completed a task, or joined in a team discussion on a task. If they do then that's grand, if they don't that's grand too. There should be no pressure to join in.

I recently sat in a group interview assisting the interviewer and the icebreaker was just say your name and the craft you enjoy the most. The room was silent from the moment Hello had been said.

The other women were so painfully shy about speaking to strangers (this is people wanting to work in retail), as one they sat looking at table not wanting to be the first to speak after the interviewer and me. I asked if we could all do it by text and they all agreed that would be much better for them. At that point the ice was broken and we had a laugh about it and it got much easier after that.

That's really all it's for.