You know the moment. The retro call opens, twelve black rectangles stare back, and someone says "so… who wants to start?" Nobody does. The facilitator fills the gap, reads the agenda, asks again. Still nothing. Four minutes in, one brave soul mutters "yeah, the deploy thing was rough," and the meeting finally has a pulse.
I used to think that was just how remote meetings felt. Then I started timing it. Across three retros I ran last quarter, the first unprompted, substantive comment landed somewhere around the six-minute mark. Six minutes of throat-clearing in a sixty-minute meeting. That's a tenth of the session spent waiting for a human to act like one.
Here's the unpopular part: the warm-up that fixes this has nothing to do with team-building. It's not about fun, bonding, or "psychological safety" as a poster on the wall. It's a tactical move to get a voice other than the facilitator's into the room before the real conversation starts. That's it. And it's the cheapest fix I know of.
The cold-start problem
There's a line in a RetroTools guide on remote warm-ups that matched my stopwatch almost exactly: if someone hasn't spoken in the first five minutes, they probably won't speak for the rest of the hour. People sort themselves into talkers and watchers early, and once you're a watcher it takes real activation energy to switch.
In an office you got that activation for free. The walk to the room, the coffee queue, the "how was your weekend" before the meeting officially started. By the time the retro began, most people had already used their voice that morning. Remote killed all of it. You context-switch from a Slack thread straight into a call, mic muted, camera optional, and the first thing anyone asks you to do is reflect honestly on a sprint.
So the warm-up isn't a nice-to-have you bolt on when there's spare time. It's the part that does the job the hallway used to do.
Why remote makes it worse, specifically
Mute is the default. In a room, silence is awkward and someone breaks it. On a call, silence is comfortable, you're just one muted tile among many, and breaking it means physically unmuting and interrupting. The friction to speak is genuinely higher.
There's no pre-meeting. The small talk that warmed people up has nowhere to happen. People join at 10:00:00, not 9:55.
The first voice anchors the whole hour. If the first thing the team hears is the lead reading "okay, what went well," everyone settles into receive mode and waits to be called on. If the first voices are three peers answering a daft question, the norm for the next hour is "peers talk here."
The five I actually rotate through
I work on Kollabe, so take the first one with the appropriate grain of salt. The point isn't the specific tools, it's having three or four you can pull off the shelf so the warm-up never becomes its own planning task. Swap in your equivalents.
1. A question, when I have zero prep time. Most weeks I don't want a game. I want everyone to say one sentence and move on. I open Kollabe's icebreaker tool, click once, read the question out, and go around the call. No login, no setup, works for a team that's never met. It's the boring option and it's the one I use most.
2. Shellcade, for the dev-heavy weeks. Shellcade is a multiplayer arcade you play in your terminal: one ssh shellcade.com or open it in the browser. A two-minute round of Tic-Tac-Toe or Snake while latecomers join hits different with an engineering team than any HR-flavoured question does. The novelty of "we're racing in a terminal" is the whole point.
3. Gartic Phone, after a rough sprint. Gartic Phone is telephone with drawings, and the mangled reveal at the end is reliably funny. When the sprint was bad and the mood is flat, five minutes of bad art resets the room before you ask people to be honest about what broke.
4. Jackbox, but monthly, not weekly. Jackbox party packs are great and too long for a Tuesday. One person owns a pack and screen-shares, everyone joins on a phone. I save these for the monthly retro or a team social where ten-plus minutes of play is the point, not a tax.
5. Codenames, when I want collaboration mode. Codenames splits the group into two teams trading one-word clues. People naturally start reading each other's reasoning and arguing a guess, which is a surprisingly good frame to walk into a retro about how the team worked together.
When a warm-up is genuinely a waste
I won't pretend the skeptics are always wrong. A team of four who've shipped together for three years and already talk over each other does not need an icebreaker. Forcing one on them feels like ceremony, and they'll know it.
The warm-up also turns toxic in two specific ways. First, when it runs long: anything past ten minutes and it stops being the doorway and becomes the meeting, with the actual retro rushed at the end. Second, when the team uses it to avoid the hard thing. If everyone's happy to play Codenames for fifteen minutes because nobody wants to talk about the incident, the game is doing damage, not good. The warm-up is a runway, not a place to live.
So: new team, partly remote, recent membership change, or a tense sprint to defuse? Worth every second. Tight team that's already loud? Skip it and start.
The one question I ask now
I stopped judging retros by whether the discussion was "good" and started asking one thing: who spoke in the first five minutes? If the only voice was the facilitator's, the retro already went sideways and I just hadn't noticed yet. If three or four people had each said something, anything, before we hit the board, the rest ran itself.
A warm-up costs five minutes and buys you a room full of people who are actually present when the questions start. Pick three or four, keep them on the shelf, and never spend the meeting deciding which one to run.
If you want the longer version with a side-by-side of all five (cost, time, setup), I wrote that up over on the Kollabe blog: warm-up games to get remote teams ready for a retro. And if you just want a question to read out on Monday, the icebreaker tool is free and needs no login.
