The best way to get a roomful of colleagues talking may be to stop asking them to talk about themselves. Give them something absorbing to do together instead…
“Tell us your name, your job, and one interesting fact about yourself.”
Cue twelve adults immediately stopping listening to each other while they desperately try to think of an interesting fact about themselves.
Corporate icebreakers are well meant. At the beginning of an away day, onboarding session, conference or workshop, you may have a room full of people who don’t know each other particularly well. In half an hour’s time you want them swapping ideas, solving problems or working together – hence the idea of warming everyone up.
The trouble is that the most obvious way of doing this — asking people to talk about themselves — can make them more conscious of the social situation, not less. Suddenly you are not simply meeting some colleagues but performing being an interesting, relaxed colleague in front of them.
What should I say? Is that interesting enough? Has somebody else already said travel?
At Sharky + George, we think there is another way to approach the problem.
Our Transformational Power of Play framework begins with Space: creating a temporary arena in which the ordinary rules and relationships of work loosen a little. Here, judgement recedes and people are given permission to behave differently. The group has something new to inhabit together.
Instead of announcing that everyone should now “get to know each other”, you give them something to do together.
We saw this particularly clearly when a leading international investment bank asked us to help with its global onboarding programme during lockdown.
Hundreds of new employees were joining online at a time, from graduates to senior leaders, all over the world. The existing process was inevitably rather dry, and the challenge was obvious: how do you get hundreds of strangers on Zoom actually interacting with one another?
Our answer was to give them a game. Participants were put into small teams and dropped into a game-show-style escape-room challenge, solving puzzles and racing against other groups. They had to talk to one another because otherwise they couldn’t crack the clues, and very quickly, the awkwardness disappeared.
More than 15,000 employees eventually went through the experience. George later described the great thing about it very simply: people had to talk to each other to work out the puzzles, so “there was no awkwardness about breaking the ice and getting to know each other.”
That gets to Connection, the second part of our Transformational Power of Play framework. Shared play gives people an external focus, and while they are concentrating on that, they are also discovering things about each other, such as who listens well, who spots things, who makes everyone laugh. They are getting to know each other without having a ‘Getting To Know Each Other’ exercise.
And, if the game is good enough, Flow begins to take over too. People become absorbed in the challenge and start thinking less about how they appear to everybody else.
In this sense, the fundamental difference between an awkward icebreaker and really good play is that one directs your attention towards the social situation, but the other gives everybody permission to forget about it.
For anyone planning a corporate event, there is a useful principle here: don’t always design an activity around the interaction you want people to have. Instead, design something compelling that makes that interaction happen naturally.
If you want different departments to talk to each other, give them a problem they can only solve together. If you want to suspend hierarchy, put the CEO and the graduate on the same team and give them something tricky to accomplish, rather than just announcing that “job titles are left at the door”.
And if you want people to relax, whatever you do, don’t tell them to relax!
Give them something worth losing themselves in, and the ice has a way of breaking itself.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
