Virtual High Five

Caveat: This icebreaker assumes that participants are willing and are able to turn their video cameras on.

QUESTION: Does the group think that everyone can virtually high-five their digital neighbour? 

OFFER: Invite your 100% online (virtual) participants to take part in some small movements, to energise everyone in the session and work as a team. Advise your participants that they will have more than one opportunity to build on their initial decisions.

PREPARATION: To facilitate psychological safety in team building, ask if everyone is willing to turn on their camera and share their visual with either a blurred or virtual background of their choice. 

CONSENT: Participants can indicate permission by turning their camera on or off as they prefer.

BEGIN: Starter instructions: based on all the information available to each person in this moment, The facilitator asks the participants to turn on their camera and give a high five to their digital neighbour by placing a hand on the side of the screen (top, bottom, right or left)?

ENGAGEMENT: The facilitator ideally comments, using participants' names, on who is successfully connecting with whom, via a virtual high five and who is nearly connecting but it is not a high five just YET.

ROUND TWO: Ask everyone to turn their camera off, so all camera's (including the facilitator) are all off.

FEEDBACK: The facilitator makes this comment: well done everyone, we're all playing the same game as one team!

ROUND THREE: The facilitator turns their camera back on and asks if it's ok with everyone for the facilitator to take screen shots when videos are turned on? Reason being that the facilitator's view is unique, with participants arranged in a way that's specific to their device (their own unique view of the session). So the high fives are more or less successful depending on how the Video Conferencing Platform happens to have arranged everyones' videos! 

(n.b.: everyone's experience of the session is different from where happen to be sitting)

BACK UP PLAN: If participants don't want to have screen shots taken: The facilitator can instead verbally give instructions to named individuals, one person at a time, to put their hand in a particular place, so there's a high-five happening from the facilitator's point of view

CONSENT: Participants can indicate permission to take screen shots by leaving their camera on.

CHALLENGE: Everyone is asked to give a high five to their digital neighbour by placing a hand on the side of the screen (top, bottom, right or left). The facilitator takes a screen shot and shares this image via screen share. The facilitator invites everyone to review this screen shot and see what adjustments they need to make (if any) to give a connecting high five with the person they are next to.

ROUND FOUR: Taking into account all the information from the screenshot, everyone is asked to give another high five to their digital neighbour and the facilitator takes another screen shot. 

(n.b.: iterating like this, as a team, shows how they can incorporate new information, at intervals, as the session progresses)

ROUND X ... repeat round 4 and continue until everyone in the screen shot is correctly high giving their digital neighbour!

SHORT OF TIME... The facilitator shares the newest screenshot image via screen share and congratulates everyone for participating no matter the outcomes / whether the high fives connected or not!