What is the What’s in Common activity? The What’s in Common activity is a short team-building game where participants identify shared traits and unique qualities within small groups. As a trainer, you can use it as an icebreaker to build rapport, improve workplace communication, and help employees get to know each other.
How Long Does the What’s in Common Activity Take?
- 15 minutes is the ideal time frame for this activity. You can easily adapt it, though, to be 10 minutes or 20 minutes.
- A FREE game that you can use and adapt for your own training, and that we use in some of our popular training course materials.
Activity Category
- Team Building
- Icebreakers
Participants
- For this game, you will need 3 or more people in each group.
- Five or six people in each group is the ideal team size.
What Is the Purpose of the What’s in Common Activity?
To get participants to engage with each other and to build rapport with their colleagues.
This also acts as a very good icebreaker and is a part of the employee experience management trainers hub.
Participants will learn about the other participants’ strengths and individual traits, and how to share and gather information as a team.
Instructions Part 1
Divide the participants into groups of 4 or more.
The way I would recommend dividing people is to get each person to draw a number from a bag and then group them into groups of say 1-4 and 5-8, and so on.
The risk otherwise is that any friends will automatically group together.
Try to divide everyone up so that they meet people from other departments or sections within the company (if this is an in-house training session).
Then ask each group to discuss and then write down on a sheet of paper the interesting things that everyone in that group has in common.
Ask the participants to avoid things that are too obvious, such as being all female.
Tell them also to avoid anything related to the body or clothing to try and guide them toward coming up with more uncommon commonalities.
5 minutes should be given for this task.
At the end of the task, a member of each group should read the list of commonalities.
Instructions Part 2
Ask the participants to create new groups and to then make a list on ONE piece of paper, 2 traits that each member of the group has, unique, that is, to those in their group.
After 5 minutes, ask one member of each team to read out the 2 unique attributes for one of the people in their group.
Other groups must then try to guess which person in the group the 2 attributes are from.
Training Game Benefits
- This can be a fun activity that gets participants to communicate and learn about each other and to ask questions of each other.
- It also gives work colleagues a chance to really get to know each other better.
Looking for more ready-to-use workplace activities? Take a look at our Employee Engagement and Motivation Training Materials for trainers.
More Training Activities
In addition to this What’s in Common activity, you can download our free eBook with 25 training day activities and games.
- 5 Coaching Skills teaching activities – for coaching workshops for employees and adults.
- EDI training activities for trainers offering equality, diversity, and inclusion training sessions.
- 10 Feedback training activities for use in feedback and communication training sessions and team-building games.
Interested in Employee Engagement Training Materials
- Fully editable PowerPoint slides
- Trainer Notes & participants guide
- Printable participant workbooks, handouts & activities in the PPTs
