Remote teams that have good communication flow foster a supportive work environment where employees can think creatively.
Employees are more confident to take on challenges and initiatives, which leads to a more talented workforce. When an organization strengthens company culture through team building, the talents and skills of the workforce are easily spotted.
As a result, employees are more engaged in their work and align with the organization’s vision and mission.
Effective communication enables information to be shared clearly and understandably, avoiding potential problems caused by misunderstandings.
With team-building communication games, you can practice interacting and exchanging ideas in a fun and challenging way but still in a low-pressure environment.
Here is a list of fun communication games that will enhance communication between your remote team members, let’s go!
Virtual Ice Breaker
Virtual Ice Breaker is a fun game that stimulates conversation. It’s also great for boosting creative thinking, personal connection, and team-building.
All you need is just your choice of icebreaker questions and a willingness to share. When planning for icebreakers, you might need to look at your target audience, particularly if it’s a formal meeting.
Fun tip: check out this complete list of icebreaker questions.
Team Trivia
Team Trivia games foster conversation and communication. It is designed to get your team members working collaboratively to achieve victory. Teams may be selected at random for three rounds of general knowledge questions.
Additionally, customization options are available for questions, presentation, theme, branding, and the addition of additional entertainment! Team trivia is an incredibly effective approach to get team members interacting and working together toward a similar goal: success.
Fun tip: try our live Trivia Game Show fully hosted by Quiz Master.
Rose, Thorn, Bud
Rose, Thorn, Bud is a mindful game that helps you start a conversation and a great way to reflect on the highlight (rose) and the challenge (thorn) they have experienced and something that they are looking forward to experiencing (bud). It’s good for building a team’s chemistry, communication, and empathy. Note that the participants of this activity are people who are willing to reflect more deeply than typical icebreakers. To start this, ask participants to take turns sharing their rose, thorn, and bud.
Fun tip: Encourage your employees to share their thoughts and feelings regarding their job and personal life.
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What Makes You Ticked Off
This game allows your team to learn about each other’s personalities and see what kind of personalities will clash. It’s great for building teamwork, empathy, trust, and communication. To play the game,
- You can start by participating in simple personality tests like DISC or True Colors.
- Appoint a speaker from your team to describe the different personality traits, strengths, and weaknesses.
What Makes You Ticked Off helps teams to learn what motivates and demotivates others that are beneficial for work communication and personal interaction.
Fun tip: Plan on how potential conflict can be avoided.
Listen and Draw
This is a simple game to play but not so simple to “win.” It takes participants’ complete focus and active listening. To start:
- Arrange your group of participants and distribute a piece of paper and a pen or pencil to each member.
- Inform them that you will provide verbal directions on how to draw an object, one step at a time.
- The practice will become increasingly difficult as it progresses; a single miscalculation could result in every following instruction being misread or misapplied.
- Participants must pay close attention to their surroundings to ensure their drawing is accurate.
- Once all instructions have been read, compare the drawings to decide the winner.
Fun tip: To engage more, decide in advance what the finished product is supposed to depict (ladybug, tree, house, flowers)
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Guess The Emoji
One of the simplest virtual communication games is Guess the Emoji. To play this game,
- Players communicate with one another via emoji strings
- Other players should decode those emojis.
- The person or team that decodes the sentence first earns a point.
Fun tip: give the game an intriguing theme such as movies, songs, celebrities– the one that interests your team the most.
Charades
Charades can improve communication skills by encouraging participants to communicate in unexpected ways and to pay attention to their body language. It is one of the most well-known nonverbal communication games for work. To play this game,
- Have players take turns acting out words while the rest of the team attempts to guess the phrase.
- Players can generate phrases using a charades generator
- Leaders can time rounds or allow participants to guess until they are correct.
Fun tip: Additionally, you can play themed games based on great literature, work-related films, or historical events.
Yin and Yang
This communication game is great for encouraging asking purposeful questions and fostering meaningful team interaction. To play this game:
- You need a list of things that usually go in pairs, such as bread and butter, salt and pepper, Mario and Luigi, Batman and Robin, or yin and yang.
- Write these things down on post-it notes and stick individual notes on team members’ backs.
- Each team member is instructed to go around the room and ask about the mystery word on their back.
Fun tip: After revealing their hidden identity, team members should attempt to circle the room once more and locate their match.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Can You Hear Me Now? is one of the simplest virtual communication. Participants will need paper and pens to participate in the game.
In each round, one player takes a turn explaining an item to the rest of the players, who then draw one form or line at a time. For example, the sun, a tree, a stoplight, or a kitten. The purpose of the game is for participants to guess the object before it is fully drawn.
The game highlights the need of providing clear instructions and demonstrates how seemingly straightforward sentences can take on unexpected meanings.
Fun tip: it’s interesting to see how the drawings turn out!
Blind Design
Blind Design is great for improving your team’s ability to give instructions. To begin:
- You need blank paper sheets, pens, a variety of objects, or pictures.
- Pair up your teammates, they should sit side by side.
- Give one team member a blank sheet of paper and a pen, and the other team member an object or an image.
- Set a time limit.
- The participant who receives the secret object/image should attempt to provide comprehensive instructions to their teammates regarding the object’s characteristics.
- The other teammate is responsible for drawing the hidden object as precisely as possible according to the directions provided.
- The team member explaining the secret object is not permitted to disclose what the object is.
- Their instructions should mostly focus on demonstrating how to draw various shapes to their partner. “Draw a circle,” for instance.
Fun tip: When the timer rings, invite everyone to compare their drawing to the original and evaluate the task’s difficulties.
Pop The Balloon
Pop The Balloon is a fun game that will improve your team’s communication style. To play this game:
- You need a group of interesting questions and balloons.
- Prepare a list of questions you believe the group will find amusing before the game start. For instance, “What is the most pointless talent you have?” “What is the most stupid thing someone has fooled you into believing?” “What will finally bring the internet down?” and so forth.
- a balloon with each question and blow it up.
- Explain to each team member that they should capture one balloon, pop it, and then respond to the question from the inside.
- Release the balloons fly into the air and let the game begin!
Fun tip: the trick is to avoid filler words such as “uh”, “like”, “kind of”, “you know”, and “okay” when responding.
Birthday Lineup
The Birthday Lineup is one of the simplest nonverbal group communication games. Participants must line up chronologically by birth month and day, without speaking. Once everyone is seated, participants announce their birthdays one by one and reveal whether or not the line goes in perfect order.
Fun tip: participants could write down their birthdays or make a gesture for the month and day by holding up their fingers.
Lip Reading Liars
Lip Reading Liars is one of the most interesting games for team communication. This game can be played in-person, online, or in a hybrid work environment. The game’s premise is that selected players must evaluate a scene’s interpretation without sound.
- Each round, one or two players wear noise-canceling earbuds or turn off their computer’s sound.
- Then, for three minutes or less, two to four additional participants act out a scene.
- The interpreters must attempt to interpret the scene’s details by reading lips and body language.
- When the play is over, listeners remove their headphones or reactivate the audio and recap the situation.
Telephone
The telephone is one of the most played communication games. To begin, one person whispers a word to the next player nearest to them. This step is repeated until the message has reached every player. The sentence is read out by the final player in line, and the first player indicates how similar the end phrase was to the initial phrase. The game highlights clear communication and effective listening.
Fun tip: Another interesting variation of the game involves players taking turns writing or sketching a phrase and comparing the final result to the message’s original meaning.
Penny for your thoughts
Penny For Your Thoughts is a type of icebreaker game that is great for fun, reflection, and fostering communication. To play this game,
- You only need to prepare a total of five pennies that is no more than 15 years old for each participant.
- a group, encourage everyone to recall a memorable or significant event from that year.
- Before beginning this assignment, let the team take a few minutes to come up with something to say.
Fun tip: If someone cannot recall anything special from the year of their coin, encourage them to explain their hobbies, and career during that period.
Secret Agenda
If you want to improve your team’s cooperation and collaboration abilities, this game is a must-try. To begin,
- You need to prepare blank cards and pens.
- Allow players to brainstorm a unique term or phrase to put on their cards after providing each team member with a card and a pen.
- They are not to share their weird words with other team members.
- Begin by saying, “Once upon a time…”. The team member seated next to you should continue the story by incorporating one of their bizarre secret words. “Once upon a time,” for example, “there was a hysterical cucumber whose blindfolded submarine texted him every Saturday morning…”.
- The story continues until the last member of the team concludes.
One-Syllable Mystery
All you need is just index cards with different terms. To play:
- Divide your team into two main groups, A and B.
- Each team should pick one person as their Clue Giver.
- The Clue Giver selects one card and attempts to draw guesses from his teammates about the mysterious person/place/object shown on the card.
- The person providing the clues is restricted to using one-syllable words to describe the thing on the card.
- For instance: “This is what you’ll need to purchase items” (Money).
- While one team’s Clue Giver attempts to explain the term, members of the opposing team are expected to listen intently and point out errors.
- If they catch the opposing team’s Clue Giver uttering multi-syllable words, they earn no points.
Fun tip: Use this when your goal is to improve your team members’ communication style and their focus abilities.
Virtual Escape Room
During the pre-social distancing era, escape rooms provided a fun method to amuse guests while also honing team-building abilities. Recently, virtual escape rooms have grown in popularity as the new normal takes hold. Each chamber in this game has a strange and dynamic plot.
Teams must decode riddles, solve puzzles within a set period, and discover secret clues to escape the area. The objective is to foster team building, and this activity provides an excellent opportunity for your team to communicate and use their problem-solving abilities.
Fun tip: Get teleported into a virtual escape room for a live escape the room challenge.
21 Questions
21 Questions is one of the most effective workplace communication activities. In this variation, a teammate selects a word or idea. Then, using no more than 21 questions, other players must guess that thought.
Because the number of questions is limited, players must develop intelligent and insightful questions that swiftly narrow the alternatives. Leaders can assign a point value to each question, and players who correctly identify the object get more points.
This game teaches teammates how to acquire information effectively, which is important when collaborating and working on projects with busy teammates.
Forensic sketch artist
To play Forensic sketch artist, you will need nothing but your team and your preferred virtual team communication tool.
- Consider dividing your team into smaller groups if you manage a larger one.
- Explain that a handful of robberies occurred last night, and witnesses provided sufficient information for the forensics team to sketch a possible culprit.
- Generate a face at Random Face Generator.
- Send a private message or email to one member of each group to allow them to see the face.
- This person should brief their team members on the robber. The team members then attempt to draw the robber based on the description.
- If you’re on a group call with the entire team, consider enabling one group to initiate the conversation first to avoid multiple people speaking at the same time.
- Everyone should share their portraits when the timer rings. The winner is the one who most closely resembles the generated face.
Fun tip: play this game when you want to spark creativity in your teams while encouraging them to communicate effectively.
Two Truth and a Lie
Two Truth and a Lie is a fun way to learn about yourself and your coworkers. To play this game online, you need paper and a pen. Participants have to write three statements about themselves; all of them won’t be true– two of the statements given should be true and one should be a lie.
Fun tip: Have everyone guess which statement is a lie and reveal the right answers.
Communication Origami
This is an excellent exercise to embrace the idea that we all hear and interpret things differently, even when presented with the same information. How it works is as follows:
- Each participant should receive one same size origami
- Inform your participants that you will guide them through the process of folding origami into a certain shape
- Inform your participants that they must keep their eyes and lips shut and avoid looking at the paper or asking clarifying questions while following instructions.
- Provide instructions to the group on how to fold the origami.
- After everyone has received all of the instructions, have them open their eyes and compare their shape to the expected shape.
Fun tip: Show that each paper looks unique even though you gave everyone the same instructions. What exactly does this imply?
Are You More Like?
To play “Are You More Like?”, you will need cards featuring items that are typically paired together (“movie” and “television,” “door” and “window,” “cat” and “dog”). The game is played as follows:
- Distribute cards randomly to each participant and inform them that they are responsible to find their partner.
- After finding their match, participants are meant to respond to the question given by their cards. “Are you more like to a door or a window?”
- Participants are expected to elaborate their answers–explain why they choose that object.
- When everyone is finished, re-assign the cards and begin again.
Fun tip: play this when you aim to foster communication and inspire team members to consider the perspectives of others.
I Feel Like a Turtles
To play I Feel Like a Turtles, you will need post-it notes and pens. Follow these steps:
- Each team member should receive post-it notes and pens. Begin by asking a basic question: “How do you feel?” and instructing your coworkers to react visually rather than vocally.
- Explain that rather than merely sketching a smiley face, they should categorize their emotions. For instance, ask them to draw an animal or a vehicle that embodies their emotions the best.
Fun tip: when everyone has completed their feelings drawings, encourage them to elaborate on their selection.
Everything’s Possible
In Everything’s Possible, you need to prepare plenty of random objects. How it’s played:
- Your team should be divided into two or more groups.
- Give one member of each group a randomly chosen object, but inform them that no other member of their team can see it.
- Instruct this team member to describe the purpose of the object to their teammates. However, this individual is not permitted to talk.
- They can only utilize their gestures to point out the correct response to their teammates.
- The team that correctly guesses the object first wins!
Fun tip: play this game when you want your team to engage in non-verbal communication.
Closing Thoughts
Fostering a healthy communication culture is the key to a thriving organization. Effective workplace communication, on the other hand, extends beyond our ability to deliver information. It requires proper instructions and active listening during conversation as well as recognizing and interpreting non-verbal clues.
Communication games provide an opportunity for teams to engage and exchange ideas in a low-pressure, fun yet challenging environment. These activities can help teams enhance their conversation and writing skills, hone their listening abilities, and make them more mindful in interpreting messages.
By incorporating some of the communication games described above, you will help employees express themselves in different ways on the job. Note that, communicating effectively is not a simple process; we all interpret information differently, which is why it’s necessary to ask questions and confirm understanding to ensure the communicated message is not misunderstood.