Better workplace communication games
Each group will create their own comic strip. Assign a set amount of time for each team to discuss what the comic will be about, what each person will draw, and so on. The team will begin drawing at the exact same time without any interaction, so everything must be discussed in detail beforehand. The team is also not allowed to see what the other members are drawing.
When time is up, have the teams gather to look at and discuss their comics. The most effective teams organize themselves with minimal help from leaders. This is an excellent game for teams to practice vision cohesion across components. This game also works well with teams separated across offices or working remotely. In most settings, adults decide the communication style and social norms. The rules of etiquette are also decided by adults. Imagine a world where every adult practised their face-to-face communication.
The following are effective communication fundamentals Stanfield, : Empathy; Established listening and speaking procedures; Respectful vocabulary; The power of the pause; Practice speaking and listening in natural settings; Introspection; Turn-taking. Any activities, exercises, and games that include these fundamentals can improve skills in communication. Interactive games encourage kids to express their needs.
Plus, when kids see these activities as fun and engaging, the more likely they are to participate. Five activities for middle and high school students 1. Famous Pairs Create a list of well-known famous pairs. Each participant should receive a post-it-note with one half of a famous pair on their back. Moving throughout the room, with only three questions per person, the participants try to figure out who the person is on their back.
Once the person has discovered who they are, they need to find their partner. The Enigmatic Self We are often mysterious to others. This game promotes self-awareness about what you find mysterious about yourself. In this activity, students write down three things about themselves that no one else knows. In groups of three or four students, each read the mysterious aspects to each other.
Each group collects the mysteries. At a later time, each group reads the fact list and the remainder of the class tries to guess who the facts are from on the list. Encourage deep respect for these mysteries. Encourage students to celebrate the uniqueness of each other. Classrooms with solid trust are often built on awareness and appreciation of each other. It is a nervous habit that is often rooted in the perceived discomfort of silence. This activity helps eliminate these fillers in conversation or in public speaking.
Each student is given a topic that they will speak about for minutes topic is not important; it should be simple. During their speaking time, the remainder of the class will stand when they hear any of these fillers occur in the speech. The class is listening and the speaker is hyper-aware of the words that they use. It is a deliberate shock to the speaker to see the entire class stand when they hear these fillers and helps to be mindful about using precise vocabulary.
Blindfold Game Create an obstacle course with everyday items in the classroom. Sort students into two groups. One person is blindfolded while the rest of the group decides how to communicate from their seats instructions on how to navigate through the course wearing a blindfold. Time each group and discuss which communication style was the most effective.
This activity builds trust and requires accurate communication to successfully navigate through the course. Drawn Understanding Have two students sit back-to-back. One student has an object and the other has coloured pencils and paper. The student with the object must describe it in as much detail as possible, without directly saying what it is. The second student must draw the object as best they can, based on the communication of the student with the object.
Being respectful and honest may still cause discomfort, and negotiating that discomfort is a critical skill. The following are activities that can help teens to develop these vital communication skills. Emotion Awareness Being attuned to our own emotional needs is the foundation of understanding why we are happy or frustrated with others.
Many teens have trouble putting words to how they are feeling, and that is often a matter of knowing how to identify complex emotions. In this activity, provide each participant with a sheet of various emojis.
Take the group through various emotion-invoking scenarios. Have them keep track and label the emotions that popped up for them. Being able to name emotions as they are cued is a first step in improving emotional intelligence, and also relaxes the amygdala from over-firing.
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If the task appears too challenging, you can allow the groups to use various props they find in the room. Upon explaining the rules, give each group 10 minutes to complete the challenge. Virtual team-building activities Trying to retain the cohesiveness of your team members while working remotely might appear challenging. However, forging team bonds does not have to depend on the physical environment. Name it! Think of a name for your newly created channel, such as emojichallenge, tunecommune, etc.
Invite your team members to join in the fun! Instruct your team to look at their phones and find their most recently played song. To avoid confusion regarding the rules, if playing in Pumble, you can pin messages to your channel so that your teammates can access them at any time.
As soon as they come up with an idea, they can send the message to the group channel. Whoever guesses correctly can share their own last played song with the rest of the colleagues. The goal list can look like this: Find an item that makes you happy in the morning Look for an object that evokes wonderful memories Share your favorite mug Proudly share the most unusual hat you own Apart from the usual lists, you can also organize a more challenging theme-based scavenger hunt where your team members search for items in a specific color.
If the holidays are near, think of holding a holiday-themed virtual scavenger hunt. After setting up a specific time frame for searching for the listed items, instruct your team members to share their photos in Google Drive, a Pumble channel, or via email. The idea is to encourage your team to make the object as fantastic as possible and fascinate everyone with their brilliant imagination. Whichever platform for the game you pick, the rules are quite simple.
During a limited amount of time, your team is supposed to find the quickest way to get out of the room, following the given clues. After you find the perfect game for your team, schedule a video call with them and prepare for hours of unforgettable fun! Explain that a couple of robberies happened last night, and the witnesses provided enough information for the forensics team to sketch the potential suspect. Generate a face at Random Face Generator.
Let one person from each group see the face by sending them a private message or an email. This person should describe the robber to their team members. The team members then try to draw the robber according to the description. If you are on a group call with the whole team, consider allowing one group to be the first one to start to avoid many people talking simultaneously.
The one which resembles the generated face the most is the winner. Outdoor team-building activities If you search for a reason to transfer the social interaction from the office cubicles into an unconventional environment, opt for organizing your next team-building activity outside. Not only will the surroundings provide your team members with a bit of fresh air, but they will also lead everyone to take a fresh perspective on their routine communication methods.
One-minute challenges usually involve physical challenges, such as stacking a pile of pennies using one hand only or keeping a balloon afloat for one minute. However, they also include solving math problems or coming up with as many words as possible based on the previously assigned alphabet tiles. The longest shadow Use this when: You would like to encourage your team to focus on their communication abilities Time: 30 minutes You will need: Nothing but your team!
The groups should attempt to position themselves in a way that they create a continuous shadow. However, they are only allowed to communicate verbally during the preparation time and not test their strategy out. The group that successfully creates the longest shadow is the winning team. Instruct them to take photos whenever they complete a task and share them on social media or your preferred communication channel. Set a specific deadline for completing the challenge. The group that completes the most tasks within the time frame is the winning team!
The minefield Use this when: You would like to build more trust among your team members and lead them to communicate more effectively Time: 15—30 minutes You will need: Various objects balls, pins, etc. These objects are mines that your team is supposed to avoid. Divide your team members into pairs and explain the game rules.
While one pair member is blindfolded, the other tries to lead and guide their partner through the field, avoiding the mines. Give each group one egg, 40 plastic straws, and one meter of tape. Instruct your coworkers to create a structure to prevent their eggs from breaking when dropped from a fixed height. Give each team 20 minutes to devise their strategy and build their egg containers. Ten team-building activities for specific communication situations Whether we spend our workdays in a brick-and-mortar office or comfortably sitting in our favorite chair at home, we can all agree on the fact that our daily interaction with other people is inevitable.
After all, every business environment implies frequent encounters with different communication situations. Sometimes they can be as manageable as an update meeting. However, occasionally they turn into a challenging task hard to handle. This is where team-building activities tailored explicitly for particular communication situations, such as conflicts and feedback, come in handy. Conflict resolution team-building activities Perceiving a team conflict as an opportunity for improving communication is the first step towards resolving it.
Although it might appear challenging to foster a positive work atmosphere when the conflict ensues, you can still reestablish collaboration despite the workplace disputes. Puzzle the leader Use this when: You wish to prevent your team from competing and show them the benefits of collaboration Time: 20—30 minutes You will need: Nothing but your team!
They are supposed to perform different movements or gestures clapping, whistling, etc. Once every team member does the same movement, somebody else can change it and perform a different gesture. The task is to be coordinated and collaborative enough to make it impossible for the activity leader to discover who the initiator of the movement is.
Explain that every pair member will ask a question. Instead of a verbal response, they need to try to mime their answer. The choice of questions is vast. Tell them that the task is to come up with a new definition of the word conflict but without using any negative terms.
When the groups agree on a solution, instruct them to write their definition down and illustrate it with a simple sketch. Upon completing their tasks, each group should present their ideas and elaborate on their choice of words.
Discuss the positive aspects of a conflict with the whole team. Nothing, something, anything Use this when: You would like to encourage your team to implement dialogue in resolving conflicts Time: 10—20 minutes You will need: Nothing but your team! Instruct them to stand facing each other while holding their fists out. Back-to-Back Drawing This exercise is about listening, clarity and developing potential strategies when we communicate.
In communicating expectations, needs, and more, it helps to clarify and create common ground. Once people have paired off, they sit back-to-back with a paper and pencil each. One member takes on the role of a speaker, and the other plays the part of the listener. Over five to ten minutes, the speaker describes a geometric image from a prepared set, and the listener tries to turn this description into a drawing without looking at the image.
Then, they talk about the experience, using several of the following example questions: Speaker Questions What steps did you take to ensure your instructions were clear? How could these be applied in real-life interactions? While speaking, what could you do to decrease the chance of miscommunication in real-life dialogue? In what ways might your drawing have turned out differently if you could have communicated with your partner?
Employees can pair off or work alone, in either case, they will need a worksheet of imaginary scenarios like this one. Appreciative Inquiry, for example, is one type of positive psychology intervention that uses storytelling in a compelling way, as a means to share hopes and build on our shared strengths. For example, one team member might describe a past success of the group or team, where their collective strengths helped them succeed.
The Characters would then be whoever was involved, the Conflict may be a challenge the team faced a new growth opportunity, perhaps. The Struggle might be something like geographical distance between team members, and the Goal would be just that: their objective or success. Visit this site for more details. These interpersonal and team communication games cover topics such as misinterpreting information, awareness of our assumptions and engaging others.
Direction Direction This activity is a slight twist on Chinese Whispers in that it uses a complex set of instructions rather than just a sentence. And here, we have only one link rather than an entire chain of people. Otherwise, the idea is identical—information gets misinterpreted thanks to noise, but we can improve our verbal communication and listening skills to minimize this risk.
First, pick a game with enough instructions that the information is a challenge to memorize. They are responsible for passing the information on to the rest of their team. The group then needs to play the game with only the instructions from the speaker. What might have contributed to this confusion? What are some key things to be aware of when we give or listen to instructions? When it comes to tasks and expectations, it goes without saying that clarity helps us avoid lots of unwanted things.
Succinctly, ambiguity contributes to stress, and clarity is empowering—something that is easy to overlook and which this game reminds us of. Any number of co-workers can participate in this very simple mime game. In these pairs, they will take turns being a mime and being an asker. While the asker can pose questions, the mime can only act out their answers.
It might unearth an awareness of implicit assumptions, bringing our conscious attention to the role these play in our judgments. Potential discussion questions will help you unpack this further: How did your questioning skills help you comprehend what was going on? What factors sometimes prevent us from asking questions when they might actually be useful? How large of a role does it really play, and how does it influence our communication?
There is no limit to the group size for this game, which requires only enough pens and paper for everybody. Start with groups or sub-groups of between four and ten players; in each of these, someone will need to volunteer as a facilitator. This facilitator simply keeps the game on track and gets the discussion going afterward. Each player writes down a feeling on a small piece of paper, folds it, then passes it to the volunteer facilitator. From him or her, they take another piece that someone else has written, and tries to act out that feeling to the rest of their group—using only their facial expressions.
The other participants try to guess that emotion and this should lead to a talk about the role of expressions. Useful discussion points include: What feelings do we understand the easiest, when only facial expressions are used? Why might that be? Describe some contexts where facial expressions play a particularly important role in communication? In what ways can facial expressions influence our ability to deal with misunderstandings?
Practicing it during our interactions with others enables us to validate their feelings and potentially avoid the stress of misunderstandings. At the end of the day, active listening games can impact positively on our relationships by encouraging us to practice specific techniques, and these, in turn, find support in the empirical literature Weger et al.
Concentric Circles This large group exercise works best when you already have a topic for discussion. It is used a lot during inclusive strategy sessions, where diverse opinions are valuable but team size can hamper rather than facilitate good communication. For this exercise, everybody has a handout that summarizes the goals of the discussion. Two circles of chairs are set up, one inside the other.
Armed with their handouts, talkers begin to engage with the topic. They use the goals as a guide for the conversation, while the watchers listen carefully and make notes. After fifteen minutes of discussion, the watchers and talkers switch circles—those who were listening before now sit on the inner circle for a fifteen-minute conversation.
It can be on the pre-chosen topic or on a different one, but the activity must conclude with a debrief. During this debrief, they reflect collectively on the experience itself: How was being a watcher, compared to being a listener? What did you feel when you were observing from the outer circle, listening but not contributing? How did this influence your learnings, rather than providing your own input?
In what ways did being a watcher impact your perspectives of the talkers? What about their dynamics? This gamestorming communications exercise is based on a team coaching technique by Time To Grow Global. In a larger group of participants, this can be done multiple times as players pair up with different conversation partners.
And in each pair, of course, team members will take turns being listener and talker. The talker discusses their dream vacation for three minutes, describing what they would like best about it but without specifying where it should be. While they talk, the listener pays close attention to the explicit and underlying details, using only non-verbal cues to show that they are listening. They outline how they could improve their dialogue with regard to active listening, then swap roles.
Used with permission from Time To Grow Global. Pet Peeve How about a chance to blow off some steam and get that empathetic listening ear at the same time? And at the same time, helping your co-worker practice active listening? In this game, one colleague has a full 60 seconds to rant about something which irks them.
The first colleague Player A simply lets loose while the second person Player B listens carefully, trying to cut through the noise by singling out: What Player A really cares about — for instance, smooth user experience on the internet; What they value — e. As you can probably see, the activity is aimed at helping teammates appreciate that feedback has positive goals. The games and exercises in this section are about connecting on a human level so that we can communicate with more emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Personal Storytelling In large organizations especially, we may only bring a part of ourselves to the workplace. If we want to communicate empathetically and build relationships with co-workers—important social resources—personal storytelling is one way we can build our teams while developing communication skills. There is no set time or place for storytelling, but it works best when a story is followed by an invitation to the group to give input.
Feel free to use the CCSG technique described earlier in this article, and that the speaker uses a reflective tone, rather than purely informative, when addressing the group. To try out personal storytelling, set aside a team-building afternoon, meeting, or workshop. Ask the group to each prepare a reading that they will share. Here are some ideas that nicely blend the emotional with the professional: Tell the group what your dreams are as a team member, for the company, or for the community e.
Then, let them share the story of what they did with it; When onboarding new people, invite the group to bring in an object which symbolizes their wishes for the new team member. Then, let them share the story behind the object. In the book mentioned below, there are also hand-outs, but you can prepare your own for this activity. In several sentences, the scenario outlines a situation where they are approached by a colleague with problems but might have other things on their plate.
After reading the scenario of their context e. The exercise is a good starting point for a conversation about constructive listening strategies. Together, the pairs can come up with more productive, empathetic, and appropriate responses, with the acting experience fresh in mind. Some discussion points include: As Talker, what feedback did your Listener appear to give?
How did you feel about the feedback you received? How might you create some listening and feedback approaches based on this? It works with any sized team and requires only a facilitator and some novel objects that can be passed between participants. So, plush toys, tennis balls, or similar—but the more imaginative they are, the better.
Players stand in a circle and pass two of the objects along to each other. One object should be passed clockwise, and the other counter-clockwise. Prior to passing on the toy, ball, or what have you, players ask something about the object and answer a question about it.
Essentially, the message will change as the object gets passed along, and players will need to stay sharp to remember who they are passing and talking to. Debrief with a chat about the communication that went on. Did anybody end up with both items at once? How did they cope? Did others help them? Other questions include: How did communication look with a longer or shorter chain?
Where was the weakest link, and why? In what ways did players support each other? How did you feel during the game? What was the impact of that emotion on you and on others? We each have unique experiences, competencies, and viewpoints, the way we collaborate inevitably decides whether we synergize or fall flat.
Here are two activities that will help your team work together creatively to solve a problem, as well as one about the role of silence. Crazy Comic This is a fun game in communication skills that will also give team members some creative freedom. They will need to communicate those creative ideas to one another, but also engage in joint decision-making for the activity to be a success.
And that activity is to create a comic together, using their complementary skills and communication to realize a shared vision. From your larger group of co-workers, let them form smaller groups of about participants and tell them their task is to produce a unique comic strip, with one frame from each person.
So, a 6-person group will make a 6-frame strip, and so forth. Between them, they need to decide the plot of the comic, who will be carrying out which tasks, and what the frames will contain. The catch is that they all need to draw at the same time, so they will not be seeing the preceding frame in the strip. Afterward, trigger some discussion about the way they communicated; some example questions include: How critical was communication throughout this exercise?
What did you find the toughest about this activity? Why was it important to make the decisions together? This exercise was adapted from Activities that build Amazon. That is, the Blindfold Rope Square exercise challenges us to look at how we communicate verbally, then think about ways to develop our effectiveness.
In a large group of participants or employees, particularly, we often need to cut through the noise with a clear and coherent message—and this game can be played with even a large group of people.
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