Any ideas are welcome, but I'm particular interested in events with $0-$100 per person budget and work with team size of 5-20 people. Thanks.
Edit: This is something we'd do during work hours.
No, not just IF POSSIBLE, either do them during work hours or don't do them at all. If a company can't make time during work hours to throw an event they are planning, then don't expect your workers to make time for the event after work either.
there was one former boss who i felt was always a bit cold and standoffish (but always professional) with me and i could never quite put my finger on why until i did show up at one of the weekly happy hours i almost never went to and realized that he loved them and spent the whole time laughing and smiling and chatting with everyone.
since i was rarely at those and especially missed most of them my first 6 months on the job (when i had some ongoing family issues that required my non-work time and focus), i suspect he took that as a bit of antisocial behavior on my part and prevented him from really trusting me
I don’t work to make friends with co-workers and hang out after hours. I’m there to put my skills to use, get paid for it, and fuck off to live my own life. Asking me to come to an event and participate for free is bullshit, especially an online event! If it hurts my reputation, whatever? I’m still getting paid and have no desire to get promoted to upper management.
People don't put up enough resistance to our workplaces invading our personal lives.
If you do that, then at least be good at go-kart, you’re paid for it.
At least it clarified the situation: They don’t expect work to be fun. I stopped organizing events. If you want work to be boring, then this is how to make work boring.
It makes me a bit sad. But at least I’m sure I don’t care if I lose them.
I hope to build a better team after moving (which is in the plans), but I’m clearly lacking the talent to build a dynamic team. One of them told me his preferred series was The Office. Now I know my role. Maybe I should incarnate the Mickael Scott role, have a separate office, and be so much a caricature of the boss that they’d have to laugh.
But Mickael Scott was the only one at the airport when the girl left.
For example, I'm a total wimp. I forced myself to do go-karting because the big macho guys wanted to do it. I hated it, it was loud smelly and scary. I was sore for days.
Maybe allow different people to make suggestions and go with ones that are out of your comfort zone instead of expected your colleagues to do things that might not appeal.
- virtual murder mystery (two people on the team wrote it all up, it was intense, but I think you could buy a good package)
- drawing apps online we use https://skribbl.io but the ads are tedious
- we did a scavenger hunt for household items on different themes (we did a thanksgiving one) - this is easy to adapt to a lot and a lot of fun to see what folks have around their house - fills a lot of curiosity and makes folks feel more connected, also folks get creative in their finds - which adds to the fun.
- I like the other suggestions of a lego set / cooking - I have a friend whose company sent cooking ingredients and folks all cooked together - another that had two or three people "compete" like a cooking show with the rest of the team judging - good times.
- literally just get a cheesy icebreaker book - for once these things really do help get folks primed and engaged.
- Play Among Us
- Give folks a gift card and have them bring what they buy to a show and tell
Really looking forward to other folks' ideas.
[0] https://scribble.feud.today/ [1] https://github.com/scribble-rs/scribble.rs [2] https://scribblers-official.herokuapp.com/
We did a happy hour using Drizzly - if your team drinks it’s a nice service and you’re basically ordering from convenience stores so other drinks and snacks are available.
Play some kind of challenge game and keep a leader board. Puzzles or trivia, or some game the whole team likes and can speed run or some other high score task.
No, I want to work for you! (I’m kidding, I can’t leave the company I founded)
PS: Is there something to do with a Lego set? Being able to keep it at the end would be nice to remember the company’s present.
You can definitely leave the company you founded, the last two companies I worked for had the founder move on after a while, it’s often a natural evolution, but maybe I’ll come work for you one day instead.
A local company shipped supplies to each person (canvas, brushes, paints) and held a video session with a teacher who walked us through how to paint a particular picture step by step. Accessible for beginners, many of us had never painted before.
Of course your marketing team might really love this. Or the guy on one of the other teams here that actually was on part-time so he could do all his paintings and prepare for his exhibition.
Personally Zoom "socializing" doesn't work for me. I'd rather stick a needle in my eye than sit around and watch my co-workers pretend to have fun. We do a weekly hangout and occasionally meetings will devolve into social time but group video chats feel like meetings, not fun.
Any sufficiently large group will likely have its loners and social butterflies, and butterflies are the people who tend to be loud, joke around, and generally try and find (even if shallow) topics to talk about.
I'd rather consider it as a character trait, than straight up dishonesty. It's also nice to have a few of those people in a group, otherwise any meeting w/o a clearly defined topic would become too quiet and depressive. They are the people who break the ice, I don't see why they can't be having fun doing that.
I agree about the "zoom socializing" part though. Mainly because what Zoom offers is a fairly flat space where you're either one of the 20 people talking/hearing at the same time (so you gotta be loud) or you don't exist. You can't easily form a bubble of three people and discuss something all three of you care about, and any topic with 20 other people either becomes too exclusive (3 talkers and 17 listeners) or too shallow. (a 20-people grand debate about the weather)
Something we've started doing at my company is monday-morning "random coffee". Everyone gets paired off to video chat with a random person for 20 minutes at the start of the day. It's been a great way to have some non-work conversation with the people I do interact with, and have any exchange at all with those I never interact with
i would quit this job sooooooo fast
random, enforced, early morning socializing is so very much not my scene
I'm also sure it would be optional if anyone had an aversion to it. It's a small company so we're flexible on that sort of thing
Shameless plug, I've been working on solving exactly this problem with Mixaba! Everyone automatically breaks into small groups of 2-4 every few minutes.
You can find escape rooms, cooking & cocktail classes, magic shows and more. Many events have a delivery component so that there's no pre-work required for the team.
Feedback welcome! You can also email me at jonathan [at] offsyte.co
It works quite well over screen share due to being time based rounds with not a huge reliance on reaction times / audio
We’ve also created a few team specific decks for Cards Against Humanity and merged them with Cards Against Containers and Cards Against DevOps. We then use Pyx-Reloaded on a VPS to play the game. Modulo the bugs in Pyx-Reloaded it’s fun, but suffers problems when people drop out.
Skrbbl has been good - we have to use personal devices to play it (same with JackBox) and it quickly becomes apparent who has PiHole on their home network and who does not.
Where I work the Xmas party was obviously cancelled because of Covid so I was expecting an online event paid-for or gift vouchers, but they said that in the end we got zilch and they decided to give away the budget to charity because "that felt like the right thing to do"... Well, for moral and engagement no it wasn't...
I'm wondering which LEGO set would be appropriate for an adult non-AFOL public...
It's free and it's like playing pictionary, everyone can enjoy via a link after the host creates the room.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/331670/The_Jackbox_Party_...
Recommended!
That's literally what they said. What's your objection?
Also do everything in your power not to label people who do not want to participate. The worst is when a company has mandatory fun, and then kiss your promotion goodbye for not "being a team player" by attending an event that doesnt interest you.
[0] Today's quiz (we got 16/30, pathetic!) https://www.theage.com.au/national/target-time-and-superquiz...
Or for a different way to think about it try what Podia did for a team dinner: https://kindops.com/remote-dinners
At The Skiff Coworking community we enjoy weekly drinks here: https://getmibo.com/ It’s so much more natural an experience than Zoom.
I've since also pivoted my startup and created a new product (https://TelescapeLive.com/) for escape rooms moving to online!
https://www.thegamegal.com/diy-escape-room-kit-alien-threat/
Five "rooms" (or in other words, five people or small groups) that all coordinate via a video call and each have a mini-site and individual puzzles to solve that build up to the main solution. I think she's pretty awesome and therefore the game is pretty awesome, but I'm a bit biased. :)
Some simple rules: - everyone's phone is muted so the imposter is not revealed by the startup sound - if anyone dies, they can't reveal it until the body is found
After everyone does the first install/game it becomes easy to do a game every time we finish a meeting 10 minutes early.
- Team Japanese cooking class via Kenji Y--we really enjoyed this one! The recipes are simple and super tasty and he's a great educational host. https://kenjiskitchen.com/
- Mixology class hosted by Avital--I have one scheduled for next month and I'm pretty excited! https://avitaltours.com/
If I have leftover budget I use that to buy a nice gift/box of chocolates/macarons/etc and send it out at the end of the quarter, but I agree, it's tough to plan bonding events while remote. Any little bit of planning an event helps though!
This works well as it feels like a shared experience of learning together, in this case learning to cook new foods. Many of us continue to make those same foods once we learned.
To make it easier on everybody, we ship any tools or ingredients we can and always do it during overlapping work hours.
Sure. Give everybody a raise and quit forcing stupid "team" shit.
My point exactly. If you give employees more money, they can afford to hire people to do their chores and then they have more free time to go out together after work (if they so desire).
Sure, people like different things, but a device (gift) and then spending time together (co-op games etc) is an awesome idea
Edit: Also some people don't have a Facebook account; that seems more common among HN's demographic.
We only collect the data we need for the service, and don't use it for any other purpose.
For ad hoc events we've played Among Us, had a tarot card reader come read fortunes, had multiple chefs do cooking classes, and had a few musicians do amateur concerts over Zoom.
Agree with others that work hours is best. We have standardized on around 5 ET for most things, which is not too late for the East Coasties and not too early for the West Coasties.
https://codenames.game/ https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=sechsnimmt https://www.jackboxgames.com/split-the-room/
I agree with others that this should be done during work hours. I do not show up to team or company events that are on my time.
It's just a comparison. Obviously you're not going to do a pen&paper RPG with a group of 20 to 500 people (we did 20 once, it was... uhm... interesting?).
>To ensure a high quality experience, join Gather on Chrome!
If you do #2 well, you can do weekly a different theme: 'virtual <your preferred pizza restaurant>', 'virtual <preferred pub>' etc, so you just order from one place every time as you would do if you were physically there. Having dinner and drinks with people helps unwind, doing it virtual helps with (not) driving afterwards after a couple of beers.
One of the games I built as well, https://oneword.games, is very well suited to work events; it's a casual, cooperative game that supports any number of players, so fits neatly into team happy hours or "offsites"
https://arvr.google.com/cardboard/
As the "teacher", take them on a virtual expedition/field trip.
Here's something we recently tried that worked fairly well: Story Time. The goal was to share short humorous stories. Exaggerations were encouraged. And topics suggested. To help I (acting as the host) started it off with a story about a car and picking up "new" clothing at 70 mph. Opening up to others for other stories, but specifically encouraging stories about cars or clothing (to help prime the pump).
People tended to thread story topics on their own for the most part, but if things quieted down, I would add in another story, likely shifting the topic around some.
A few stories fell flat, but they are short and for the most part it worked really well. It also helped with one of the parts of "Zoom Happy Hour" that I hate: not knowing who is supposed to be talking and when to join in.
It does require a level of comfort with the team, but at the same time it allowed an enjoyable time for those who just wanted to lurk. It also didn't appear to be limited to those who lean extroverted as some happy hours can even in real life.
Speaking seriously, we have a Mo-Wed-Fri 3PM 'virtual coffee break'. The team of ~15 is invited, but it's optional, and free mic; you can talk about anything. It's fun, not always the same people, not the same topics.
2) Among Us (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth...)
It is a drawing game, but it has no scoring, so it is very welcoming for all skill levels, including zero!
Among Us also has a desktop version if you prefer, but it is paid. (cheap though, 10BRL, dunno dollars) (you probably know, but to anyone who reads)
Despite this, virtually no companies I know of are encouraging this real, physical, safe interaction that has a huge potential for building team bonds.
It's been a year so far, and we could well be doing this for years.
I think that outdoor team events are a reasonable way forward.
It was surprisingly fun. You could join just using a link (no account needed), and scorekeeping was well done. They incorporated media, so for some questions a song would play, for others there would be images, word scrambles. My favorite question type, they would play a song, and you had to choose, from a list of emoji, all of the emoji that applied to that song. Unsure how much of this is default functionality of the tool, and how much was my teammates creativity, but it definitely worked very well and as well received coupled with a zoom call. We had about 20 people of all ages playing.
Currently we have a cooperative "pub trivia" game, a jigsaw puzzle suite, and a "co-opetition" word scramble game where you are working together but competing to be the best of the group as well.
If you do give it a try, I'd love to answer any questions & hear any feedback you have at cory [at] playpad.com - we are still in early alpha and iterating rapidly / trying out new ideas directly based on the feedback we receive!
https://www.red-herring-games.com/product/murder-on-the-diso...
Also using zooms break out rooms to split us up into small groups of 4-6 so you can have a more personal chat really. Do that for 10m. Then shuffle the rooms. In a 20 room only a few people will really talk.
Your group size suggestion is great. You want to avoid the Ringelmann effect "in which big groups can become less productive because people tend to feel less committed to an outcome."
And you're challenged by "Social Cooling"(Dutch technologist Tijmen Schep says that a big-data society can chill our personal relationships because we’re being watched all the time.)
It's a fun way to interact, laugh, and find out who says they can't draw but can actually draw. We play with about 8 people, sometimes others join in to just watch or we take turns. Honestly, skribbl has been the closest thing to in-person interactions we have had in a long time. I created the weekly 1-hour coffee break meeting on our calendars @ 3pm local time. Usually water-cooler talk, sometimes video games for the laughs.
We have a lot of trivia games, some Quiplash-style games, photo sharing games, and other interaction slides that make for some really interesting and fun event options. And everything we have is customizable so you can add content specific to your company if you want.
Plus there's a sound board :)
We've found the most engagement by organizing larger team "mini-festival" where you pre-book multiple experiences and let your teammates pick & choose which events they want to attend. https://demo.evee.com
We had a company event from City Brew Tours (based out of NYC, I believe, but we're in Philadelphia) where we were shipped boxes of cheese, crackers, and beers (or ciders or sodas at the employee's selection to support alternatives) and during the event were given a tasting experience over Zoom.
It was excellently done, gave team members a chance to socialize about non-work things, and we learned something, too.
Hosts were great and led us through 4 four rounds of creative trivia (including out-of-the-box questions, picture round, music round).
We were split into teams in breakout rooms so we actually got to converse and connect with people on our 5-6 person team. Also spent time in the main room as an entire group.
Pricing is $15-20/person depending on time of game. We play at least once a month, couldn't recommend more!
- Another time we did a game where each team member sent a story to the organizer, names were removed, then everyone tried to match the story to the person.
- There's always guest speakers to present on a relevant topic. Easier now that they don't have to travel.
Most of these would show a leaderboard of whoever has made most contributions (within your event/subgroup) and you can turn it into a game.
Only disclaimer, Increment’s my product.
I find a lot of these remote games have a large impact on productivity in the day. They are a great way to start conversations and get to know each other.
- lots of diversity, choice (helps finding something that best fits everyone)
- lots of positive emotions (designed by people whose jobs it is to make you have fun). tremendously effective at creating shared moments of joy.
- lots of cooperative games (team building yaye!)
- loose engagement: easy to hop in and out without much fuss, play as much as you want
- easy to repeat: so many games to choose from, some games have no ending
- won't necessarily fit anyone (but what does)
recommendations?
- Portal
- Among Us
I'm sure fellow HNers will have better suggestions
Activity: Split into groups of 5 and go sailing. Relaxing or you can organise a race around island #5 ( start and finish next to the big boat ).
Search for "Pancake Sailor" on Steam - it's free and has both Windows and Mac version.
Greg
We have built social/banter filled games to play right within Slack called Bored.
The games are not the typical team games - they involve accusing and deceiving people, roasting your colleagues and the like.
If that sounds like your thing and you are on Slack, you can install it from https://bored.social/
What other games do you have lined up?
Ugh. The last thing I want to do after working all day is "hang out" with co-workers. If you're going to force me to participate, it better be during work hours, and you can't expect people to make up the lost "work" time.
What we've been doing is giving our employees a stipend to spend on dinner and/or drinks and everyone joins in in an activity via Zoom- anything from trivia to true or false show and tell.
I hope this helps! Good luck!
We all received a kit in the mail and on a Friday afternoon, everyone was guided by an indoor gardening expert. It was a calm, pleasant, ~2 hour exercise and I got a fresh plant for my desk out of it.
What we've been doing with the events I organize is giving employees a stipend to spend on drinks and/or dinner and then we all participate in an activity on Zoom.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
The activities I’ve helped vet are all super fun and engaging and our customers have loved them as well.
or if someone has a copy of Jackbox Party Pack that's also another game that's fun and easily streamable, without costing a lot of money as you only need one license to play as a group.
I started remotely last year and playing these kind of games have been a great way to get to know the team in a more informal setting.
Also have heard good things about the free options available at rume or zombies.io.
Disclosure: I previously worked with one of the founders
- We have open games of Among Us which are also great.
- We also did an online Virtual Escape Room within my small team, which was great fun.
If everyone is into Battle Royales, Warzone or Fortnite can be fun as well.
I recently left my job at Google to focus on building a trivia platform (https://www.trivvy.co/). We offer both async trivia leagues and live trivia games over Zoom with professional hosts. We're currently beta testing our live games (for free!), so if anyone wants to do a fun live event (anywhere from 60-90 minutes), shoot me an email (sam at trivvy dot co).
Also if you're interested in trying out a multi-week season with one game/week played whenever players are free, feel free to reach out as well :)
Short tournaments could be fun. The site allows people to be spectators to games they're not participating in, and if everyone is connected by voice chat it could be a nice shared experience.
Perhaps it depends on how much the team already trusts one another.
Have games like Telestrations and Draw and Guess that are very fun for teams!
