Having fun at work
There are some people who are blessed to enjoy what they work with. I’m lucky enough to be one of those people, and I feel like it’s part of responsibilities to ensure the rest of the team get to join along where possible.
When I sit and listen to a lengthy talk, I often find myself losing focus - I prefer generally to consume media in written format, or at least as a video at 2x speed with subtitles. So when I’m in a situtation where I can predict some of what someone is going to say, but it’s presented at regular human speech speed, I play a little game in my head. It’s a game I’m sure many are familiar with: buzzword bingo. Any time someone says a common buzzword, catchphrase or some repeated terminology, you award yourself a point. You can play it with others by each writing down a list and checking them off as you go. I figured it would be fun to play that during our last offsite, so I wrote Offsite Bingo in Derw, so we could play along. The source is here for anyone wishing to edit the wordset for their own offsites.
When working in a large org, it’s important to remember that not every team has the same culture or mindset as you. So the idea of fun is not always shared: they might look on playing bingo as childish or disrepectful. We definitely didn’t play it during the most serious talks at our offsite about the coverage of our news organizations on heavy topics such as the war in Ukraine. But internal talks relating to organization or team topics? They’re fair game. If you attend enough of these ambitious talks about the future, you start to see the pattern in terms used — “going forward” is a particularly sticky one. It’s okay to have a little fun at that expense — would you really want to sit in a room where everyone takes themselves so seriously that they can’t laugh at themselves? One of my favourite games for practicing speeches is to play powerpoint karaoke. Take some random slides, and present them as if they are your own. You are not allowed to look at them beforehand: the first time you see them will also be the first time your audience sees them.
When you’re all digital, there’s a collection of fun games that can be played without needing to be co-located. Skribbl.io is a good one for just guessing each other’s drawings. My prefered drawing game is Gartic Phone, a game where you take it in turns to write headlines and others try to draw them, then the next player tries to guess the new headline and so on. Jackbox has several packs of games, all of which have both duds and winners in there. The best thing about all these games is that you can easily adjust the humour to match the people playing. There’s no need to always stick to the darkest humour if you’re playing with your grandma, for example. They also work well both digitally and in-person, so you can establish the behaviour of playing them together digitally then have a great time in-person when you actually get to meet up too.
Finally, we have the typical tools: team lunches, and afterworks. You gain a lot from eating and drinking together, without being tied to talking about work topics. If you’re working on a team that doesn’t do this together, you’re missing out. It can be done digitally too, albiet a little more awkwardly.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s just some thoughts I had around having fun. Any suggestions for more fun activities to do as a team is most welcome.