Icebreaker questions for all-hands
Written for the part of the all-hands where you can't go around the room. Each question works as a poll or a chat prompt — binary choices, short answers, things that produce a chart rather than a string of individual responses.
When to use these
Use these in the opening minute of an all-hands or town hall. Run the question as a live poll or invite responses in chat; the format is the part that matters at this scale, not the depth of the answer. Skip narrative questions — at 100 people, no individual answer gets read by anyone except the person who wrote it.
The questions
- Coffee or tea this morning?
- Working from home or in the office today?
- How many meetings have you been in already today: 0, 1-2, 3-4, or 5+?
- Best office snack: sweet or savory?
- Hot weather or cold weather?
- Are you a morning person or a night owl?
- Cats or dogs?
- Picked your seat for this meeting on purpose, or sat wherever?
- How long is your commute today: zero, under 30 minutes, 30-60, or over 60?
- How long have you been with the company: under 1 year, 1-3, 3-5, or 5+?
- Camera on or camera off as your default?
- What's one word for how this quarter has gone?
- Slack or email as your default channel?
- Are you in the office today, at home, or somewhere else?
- Spreadsheets or documents — which do you open first in the morning?
- Have you used a new tool this quarter: yes or no?
- What's one emoji that describes today?
- Did you eat breakfast today?
- Standing desk or sitting desk?
- Music while working or silence?
- How many windows do you have open right now: 1-3, 4-6, 7-10, or 10+?
- What's a one-word reaction to the all-hands theme this quarter?
- How many days a week are you in the office: 0, 1-2, 3-4, or 5?
- Do you keep your meeting calendar open all day or check it once?
- Phone in another room while working, or on the desk?
Questions we'd skip
Skip anything that asks for a sentence-long answer at this scale. Five hundred people typing a sentence produces a chat log nobody reads. Skip "how are you feeling about [strategy / product / decision]" — at all-hands scale this either invites silence or invites complaints, neither of which serves the meeting. Skip questions that surface tenure asymmetrically — a question that only makes sense if you've been at the company for five years excludes the new hires who needed an in.
Games that pair well with these
Common questions
- Should we use chat or a live poll?
- Live poll for binary or four-option questions; chat for the one-word ones. Chat scales worse but produces a more honest read; polls scale infinitely but only work for predefined options.
- How long should this take in a 30-minute all-hands?
- Two minutes, including the time to read the question, collect responses, and react to the result. Anything longer eats the agenda; anything shorter doesn't give the answers time to arrive.
- What if the answers are boring?
- They will be. The point of an all-hands warmup isn't a fascinating answer — it's getting every attendee to do something other than passively watch a screen for the first time in the meeting. Even a boring poll achieves that.
Meetings these questions suit
Run these in the browser with Icebreaker Questions
Share the room link, the wheel picks a question, every teammate answers in turn.
Try Icebreaker Questions