Learning how to communicate well is essential in any organization given that it can otherwise be the cause of conflict and cause of many workplace issues that occur. This communication skills icebreaker is a useful activity that is also great for helping employees with their presentation skills. Additionally, it can be a great icebreaker that helps participants to get to know each other.
Suggested Activity Time-Frame
This is an activity that is perfect for a full-day training session and for which you can allow 30 to 60 minutes in total.
If you are running a much shorter training session, you can water down the time frame and the number of presentations in the activity below.
Group Sizes and Number of Participants
The ideal class size will be 12 to 30 participants. I suggest to then divide them into 4 or 6 teams.
Purpose of this Activity
This is a good strategy to help participants remember information and to improve how they are able to summarize key points.
Instructions for this Communication Skills Icebreaker
1. Present some content to your audience of participants.
2. Divide the participants into an even number of groups. There should be between 2 and 7 members in each team. Ideally, there should be between 4 and 6 teams in total.
3. Assign a different type of audience to each team.
The types of audience that you choose should be relevant to the topic you are teaching, i.e. those for whom the topic is relevant.
For example, if relevant to the topic, one audience could be 15-year-olds, another one young professional people, and so on.
4. Assign the same type of audience to a pair of teams, which will compete against each other.
5. Ask each team to work independently to prepare a presentation that is suitable for the audience that they were assigned.
6. Ask each pair of competing teams to deliver their presentations in turn.
7. The teams that were assigned a different audience will watch and listen to these presentations.
8. At the end of both competing presentations, ask the other teams to select the presentation they think was the clearest and the most appropriate for the target audience.
9. Ask the next pair of competing teams to deliver their presentation and the other teams to act as adjudicators.
10. Repeat the process until all pairs of teams have given their presentation.
11. At the end of all the presentations, summarize. You might also want to ask for the class feedback and just to give them a chance to express what they learned by doing the activity.
The Benefits of This Activity
- This activity is useful for training sessions on communication skills.
- This is a good activity to give participants more ownership over their learning, thus increasing motivation.
- Great activity for a presentation skills training session.
Dr Valeria (Lo Iacono) Symonds
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