Sixty questions. Not one “share a fun fact”.
Icebreaker questions for work are short prompts you ask at the start of a meeting so that everyone speaks once before they have to speak properly. The good ones are specific, answerable in under a minute, and safe to answer honestly with your manager in the room. Below are sixty of them grouped by theme, free to use in standups, retros and team meetings, with a tool that deals a question to a random person so it stops being the same three volunteers every week.
Press the button and the duck deals a question at random.
Ready when you are.
Food, favourites and small pleasures
Start here if the group is new to each other. Nobody has to be clever, and everybody has an opinion about crisps.
- What's the best thing you ate this week?
- What's a small purchase that improved your life way more than expected?
- What's your most controversial food opinion?
- What's your favourite sound?
- Coffee, tea, or something stranger?
- What's your ideal weather?
- What's your favourite way to waste ten minutes?
- What food could you eat every day for a month?
- What's a tiny thing that instantly improves your day?
- What's your favourite smell?
- What snack deserves more respect?
Films, music and comfort watching
These turn into arguments, and the arguments are the point. Better with a team that already knows each other well enough to be wrong out loud.
- What's your go-to karaoke song, even if you'd never sing it?
- What movie have you seen the most times?
- What's the best live event you've ever been to?
- What's your comfort TV show?
- What's the first concert or show you ever went to?
- What's a book or movie you pretend to have finished?
Work, teams and how you got here
Career shaped without sounding like an appraisal. This is the set that surprises people about a colleague they have sat next to for two years.
- If your job had a theme song that played when you joined a call, what would it be?
- What's the best piece of advice you've ever ignored?
- What fictional workplace would you most want to work at?
- If you had to teach a class on one thing, what would it be?
- What's the best team you've ever been part of, work or otherwise?
- What did you want to be when you were seven?
- What's the strangest job you've ever had?
- If you could swap jobs with anyone on the team for a day, who and why?
- What's your favourite thing you've made, at work or not?
Let the duck choose who answers
Paste your team in once and the duck deals a question to a random person, with no repeats until everyone has had a turn.
Quirks, confessions and browser tabs
Low stakes admissions: the tab nobody closes, the word nobody can spell, the board game somebody is unreasonably good at.
- What was your first ever screen name or email address?
- What's the last photo you took that wasn't a screenshot?
- What's the most useless talent you have?
- What's a word you always spell wrong?
- What's the oldest piece of technology you still use?
- What tab is always open in your browser?
- What board game are you suspiciously good at?
- What's one thing on your desk right now that has a story?
- If you won an award for something mundane, what would it be for?
Opinions and things you got wrong
Mild controversy only, nothing that needs a moderator. These get a room talking faster than anything else on the page, so keep half an eye on the clock.
- What's something you were completely wrong about?
- What's a hill you're willing to be mildly inconvenienced on?
- What's something everyone seems to love that you just don't get?
- What's a rule you think should exist but doesn't?
- What's something you learned way too recently?
- What's your unpopular opinion about meetings?
Hypotheticals and what-ifs
Best for quieter groups. Inventing an answer is easier than dredging one up, and there is no version of it that is wrong.
- What skill would you learn instantly if you could?
- If animals could talk, which would be the rudest?
- If you could instantly become fluent in one language, which one?
- If you had a mascot like this duck, what animal would yours be?
- If your pet could review you, what would the review say?
- What would your autobiography be called?
- If you could add one national holiday, what would it celebrate?
- If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who and what restaurant?
- If your week had a weather forecast, what would this one be?
- If you could freeze your age at any year, which would you pick?
- If today had a title like an episode of a show, what would it be?
Places, memories and what's next
Warmer, and slower to answer. Save these for a Monday, or the week after a rough sprint.
- What's the best gift you've ever given?
- What's the furthest you've ever been from home?
- What's the most beautiful place you've ever seen in person?
- What's your favourite building you've ever been inside?
- What's a sound from your childhood you never hear anymore?
- What's the best thing about your hometown?
- What's the most spontaneous thing you've ever done?
- What's one thing you're looking forward to this month?
How to run icebreakers at work
Use one question for the whole meeting rather than a different one per person. Everyone answering the same prompt turns it into a conversation, because people can react to each other, and it stops the round becoming sixty seconds of admin while somebody reads out a new question each time.
Cap answers at a minute. If you already run a timer for standup updates, use that. Long icebreaker answers are the reason people say they hate icebreakers, and almost nobody needs more than four sentences to explain their unpopular opinion about meetings.
Have something else pick who goes first. Left alone, the round goes to the same three extroverts and everyone else works out they can wait it out. Skip the whole thing when the day is already full, when something has broken, or in any week the team is talking plenty on its own. An icebreaker every single day stops being a warmup and turns into a tax.
The duck is holding sixty questions
Free, and there is no account to make. Nothing leaves your browser. Add your team once and run it at the top of any meeting.
More for the same meeting: sixty standup meeting jokes ready to read out, and nine more ideas for making standups fun.