Having more fun in remote meetings: 10 favorite exercises from SVT

After ten months of working from home with nothing but remote meetings, we felt that our toolbox of exercises that make meetings fun and engaging was totally empty. We had pushed our skills to the limit and there was nothing left to give. Too bad when we as designers often aim to make other people feel creative and engaged in meetings and workshops.

In the beginning of the year, SVT ran one of our two yearly Tech sprints, where co-workers from different parts of the organisation can pitch ideas and work on them together for two weeks. We decided to use the time to refill that much-needed toolbox. We shared experiences of successful as well as awkward meeting experiences, shared exercises and scanned the internet for new inspiration.

Here are some new favorite exercises to brighten up life in the home office in 2021.

1. Trading card

⏱ 20–30 min 🙂 Groups of up to about 10 people 🎯 Get to know each other

Warm up and get to know each other better with this fun exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to take time to get to know another person in the group better by discussing a number of topics and creating a personal trading card for each other based on the answers.

You can also level this up by choosing a specific theme, maybe a superhero theme, for the topics and trading card.

Suggested questions:

• What’s your name?
• What’s your role?
• What are your strengths within your role?
• Can you tell us something about yourself that others may not know about you?

Suggested questions (superhero theme):

• What would you be called as a superhero?
• What would be your superpower?
• Who would be your sidekick?
• What is your kryptonite?

Step by step

1. Prepare a template with the discussion topics and room for the portrait in a collaboration tool (like Mural or Miro) and make a copy for each participant.
2. Divide the group into pairs.
3. Explain that all couples will have 10 minutes to talk to each other about a number of questions and 5 minutes to compile the questions into a trading card for the person they talked to. They should also draw a quick portrait of the person to complete the card.
4. Send each couple out in a separate meeting and call back when 15 minutes have passed.
5. Gather the group and tell them to present their colleague with the help of their trading card. Go through the whole group and let each person tell about their colleague for about a minute each. 5–15 min.

2. Check-in with GIFs

⏱ 10 minutes 🙂 Suitable for small and larger groups 🎯 Start off a meeting

A playful check in that reminds everyone that their colleagues are human. To check-in in the beginning of a meeting is a way to set the tone and create space for reflection

Step by step

1. Decide on a question:, for example: “How are you today?”, “How do you like the winter?”
2. Ask the participants to look up a GIF that answers the question and post it in the meeting chatt or in your workshop tool.
3. Ask the participants to present their GIFs, one at a time, and be careful to listen to everyone.
4. Take turns popcorn style or ask participants to pass forward to the next person.

3. Common gestures for the web cam

🎯 Communicate better

Many of us have probably reacted to the difference between meeting in person and digitally and realized that it can be a bit messy if everyone in a video meeting has the microphones on at the same time (there may be a lot of background noise). Another pretty recurrent problem is people talking over each other, since we do not get as clear cues as in face to face communication. But a meeting where everyone has turned off the microphone and maybe even the video will of course make it hard to get a spontaneous and meaningful exchange.

A life-saver for this can be to create common gestures to use during video meetings and workshops and to agree that everyone has video on. Decide in the team or group what would be good to use gestures for and what kind of gesture you should use to express this. Maybe you want to be able to express applause (throw up some jazz hands), show that you have a question (hold your palm up against the camera) or express that something is a good idea (make a heart with your fingers or thumbs up).

4. Counting Together

⏱ 10 minutes 🙂 Works best on groups of 5–10 people 🎯 Communicate better

A fun exercise where you also practice concentration and taking turns within a group. This exercise may be a good way to get the collaboration going before a workshop or other meeting where it’s important that everyone takes part.

Step by step

1. Turn on your cameras.
2. Try counting to ten together by taking turns to say a number, but without having a pre-defined order.
3. If two or more people speak at the same time, start over from one.
4. Iterate until you’ve reached the goal (or until you give up).

5. Drawing apples

⏱ 10–20 minutes 🙂 Works best on groups of 5–10 people 🎯 Facilitate creativity

A key principle for idea generation is that quantity is a prerequisite for quality in the end. But the ideas we come up with can be quite similar to each other. To prevent this and enable divergent thinking, it is important to build on each other’s ideas. Drawing apples is a sketch exercise that highlights these principles in a good way.

Step by step

1. Prepare a grid for each group with about 30 squares.
2. Divide the participants into groups of 4–6 people each and assign them a grid.
3. Explain that the purpose of the exercise is to define principles for creativity and idea generation and help us open up to divergent ideas. Then tell them to work in silence and draw as many different types of apples as they can. Starting in the top left corner of the grid, they take turns to fill the boxes. Each new apple must in some way be different from all the previous ones.
4. Let the groups draw in silence for 10 minutes or until all the boxes are filled. You might play some music in the background.
5. Give all groups 2–3 minutes to discuss the exercise, think about what they learned if they gained insights into any principles for creativity and idea generation.
6. Collect all groups’ grids with sketches so that everyone can take part of them. Go through the questions from step 6 and ask the groups to share their insights about principles for creativity and idea generation.

It’s really nice to see the groups go from drawing pretty similar apples (an apple, an apple with a worm, an apple slice) to apple juice and The Big Apple. This is when the magic happens!

6. Collage — what experience are we creating?

⏱ 15 minutes + preparation)🙂 Small and larger groups 🎯 Facilitate creativity

This exercise can be used to stimulate a product team or other group to think about the experience of what they are building. The use of images gives the group a common language and to talk about what experience they are striving for.

Step by step

1. Prepare a collage of photos in your workshop tool (eg. Mural or Miro). At least 20 photos! Try to select photos that express different things.
2. Ask the participants “How do you want the service to feel and be experienced?
3. Participants get a few minutes to look at the collage and select 1–2 photos.
4. Ask participants to present and motivate their choice.
5. Write down all “experience words” in a common place.

7. Sketch a Triangle and a Square

⏱ 3 minutes 🙂 Groups of up to about 15 people 🎯 Energizer

A quick activity that will surely lead to laughter and boot the energy level in the meeting — particularly if the participants are unprepared for what’s coming. The game host gives the instructions one step at the time.

Step by step

1. Turn your cameras on, stand up and point to the camera.
2. Sketch triangles in the air with each of your index fingers.
3. Now sketch squares in the air instead.
4. And now for the tricky part: Sketch a triangle with one finger and a square with the other. Lot’s of cred if you can do it!

8. Home Treasure Hunt

⏱ 5–60 min depending which version you choose +preparation 🙂 Can be adapted for small teams and larger groups 🎯 Energizer / Team building

A remote treasure hunt, where you look for treasures in your home or even around your neighborhood. We’ve used this either as a short energizer in meetings, or as a separate social and team building activity. Below are two versions of the game, but it can be varied in many ways to fit your fun promoting needs.

The Short Version

1. Give everyone in the meeting 30 seconds to find something in their home, for example “Go fetch something yellow” or “Find something that’s older than you are”.
2. Show and tell each other what you found one at a time if you are a small group. In a larger meeting, ask people to turn the camera on and show their treasures at once, or post them in the meeting chat.

The Long Version

This is a team activity, where several teams compete against each other.

1. Prepare a list of treasures that the contestants are to find. The should be long enough to make it hard or impossible to collect all the items, and may contain some things that are easy for many people to find in their homes (eg. a musical instrument, something round), and some things that are more uncommon eg. a subway sign, a snowman). Harder things may yield more points.
2. Divide the group into teams of 5–7 people and make sure each team has a digital room to meat up.
3. In each team, collaborate to find as many items as you can from the list. When you find a treasure, take a photo with yourself in it and post to a thread in a digital channel that everyone can see.
4. Regather in the large meeting, announce the winner and reward them with a price.

9. Music quiz “Whos favorite song?”

⏱ 30 minutes +preparation 🙂 4–8 persons 🎯 Team building / Hang out

Trying to match music taste with the right person is a fun way to get to know each other

Step by step

1. Ask everyone in the team to tell you their favorite song.
2. Create a music quiz with the songs, for example by putting them in a playlist.
3. Play 30 seconds from every song and let the participants guess who’s favorite it is.
4. Walk through the playlist together and reveal the right persons for every song.

10. Create a playlist together

⏱ 5 minutes 🙂 3–12 persons 🎯 Team building / Hang out

Fun and cosy when we can’t hang out and play music together in the office.

Step by step

1. Prepare an empty playlist and make sure its collaborative.
2. Decide on a theme for the playlist. You can do it together or take turns in the group. Examples of themes: “Songs I listen to on a blue day”, “Bicycling”, “The songs that made me who I am”.
3. All participants add their favorite songs for the theme to the list.
4. Make a new playlist every friday!

Finishing words

We’ve tried out all of these exercises in different constellations and found them helpful to boost energy levels, get creativity going and have more fun in remote meetings. They have also brought us closer to our colleagues and made us feel a bit less alone in our home offices.

Do you have any favorite exercises that work well in remote meetings? We would love your additions to the toolbox!

Corona-safe greetings

/Sally, Johanna & Malin