Free Team Building Activity: Common Ground
This free team-building activity is a light-hearted icebreaker that highlights the importance of communication.
Overview
It’s a great icebreaker activity that is best used at the beginning of the day to get participants communicating and finding out a bit more about each other. You simply ask each team/table to come up with a list as long as possible of things that all team members have in common.
Key themes: Communication; getting to know one another
Participants: 5 – 100
Timing: 5 – 20 minutes
Pre-Work
- Ensure that there is paper and a pen for each table/team.
- You might want to have some examples/suggestions to get their lists started (for example everyone loves chocolate, or everyone watches a particular TV show).
- You could also provide prizes for the winning team(s).
Equipment and Layout
One bottle of wine per team, one wineglass per team, blindfolds for 5 members of each team, one corkscrew per team.
Running the Common Ground Activity
- Let participants know that they have a set time in which to come up with their list of common things shared by the whole team/table.
- All team members must have the item in common.
- Teams can’t simply list similar body parts, such as “We all have eyes.”
- Teams will have a limited time to create their lists, so they need to work quickly – give them regular time checks to let them know when they have 5 mins, 2 mins, 1 min, 30 seconds left.
- The team with the longest list wins.
- Similarities can then be shared with the group at large.
We hope you enjoy using this team-building task, and if you want to view others like it, check out our list of free team-building activities. Or if you are interested, check out how our team-building programmes could help.