
Hello again! We’ve now shared 10 energizers that are quick and easy to do with your teams. We love hearing from you as you try them out. Remember to email us with any favorites at innovation@ibx.com. You’ll find a surprise in your inbox when you share your experiences with us! As a wrap-up, below are four more energizers you can use when you’ve got time and are looking for a fun way to use it!
1: Two Truths & A Lie
This game is great for introducing new colleagues or getting to know each other better. There are a couple of ways to do this one. The meeting organizer can collect two facts and one lie about each colleague in advance and put them in to a multiple-choice poll or on a word document. Then ask your team to guess which one of the statements about each colleague is a lie.
You can run this poll at the start of each meeting – always introducing a different colleague. Encourage the crazy! The more quirky the statement, the more fun this virtual icebreaker is.
Or, if you’re able to spare some time, during a meeting, have each participant take 3 minutes to type up 2 truths and 1 lie. Then go around with each participant sharing their screen. Remember to give the group time to guess which is the lie.
P.S. Don’t forget to ask each participant to share at least one story behind the facts.
2: Story Around the Circle
With this energizer, you’ll tell a shared story and have fun while improvising. We love this exercise as it’s simple, engaging and can be easily adjusted to meet your needs. We find this exercise is best for smaller groups and goes smoothest – at least at first – when you determine in advance the order in which everyone will contribute.
The meeting organizer starts with a line like “Once upon a time, in a land far away, 5 people got together to solve all the world’s problems. Everything seemed easy, until one day one of the people saw on the horizon…” and invites the next person in the group to continue the story and add the next line. This keeps going until everyone has contributed to the story.
You may want to identify a scribe who will write down the story as it develops. If you want people to explore a certain topic such as company communication, start the story with an appropriate line. If you want them to just have fun and be energized, maybe start with something ridiculous! If this really resonates with your team, someone may want to draw images to go with the story.
You can keep participants on their toes by adding rules like the lines have to rhyme in couplets, or have a word that people can’t use or must use. You could even choose who does the next line, rather than going around in order.
3: The Doodle Dandy
Give each participant a short phrase like those listed below and ask them to create a doodle using the phrase. See if the other participants can guess the phrase.
Here is a sample phrase list, but feel free to encourage your colleagues to come up with their own too.
“Happy as a clam”
“I can’t get no satisfaction”
“Where in the world?”
“A hard day’s night”
“Human nature”
“The art of noise”
“Here comes trouble”
4: Picture Charades
This is a take on Charades, but with a remote twist in which you can only use images to explain whatever famous movie, book or song the participants pick. Typical rules stand: no talking and the images cannot be directly from the movie or book. We normally put a limit of 5 images for each turn.
For more ideas, visit: sessionlab.com/blog/online-energizers/