Trivia for work.

You drew the short straw for Friday drinks or the all-hands. Here is a quiz that takes an hour to set up, runs itself in the room, and does not look like a training module.

A format that fits a meeting

• Four rounds of eight questions, about 45 minutes. Long enough to have a winner, short enough that nobody checks their calendar.
• Teams of four to six, mixed across departments if you can. A team made of one department wins its own round and loses the rest.
• One round about the company, written with care: when the office opened, who has been here longest, the name of the coffee machine. Nothing anyone would be embarrassed by.
• A picture round, because it is the round people talk about afterwards.

Questions that include everyone

The quiz goes wrong when one table of sports fans wins every round. Mix the subjects: food, places, music across decades, science, film, words, and numbers where closest wins so nobody is shut out. Avoid anything that needs one country's school curriculum, and anything about politics.

Hybrid: half in the room, half on the call

1. Open the TV display in a browser tab and share that tab on Zoom, Teams or Meet. Everyone sees the question and the clock.
2. People in the room and people on the call answer on their own phones, in teams. A remote team is just another table.
3. Stay on the call to read the questions. The app keeps the clock and the scores, so the people at home are not waiting on someone in the room to mark their paper.

Keeping it fair

Somebody will google. Paste is turned off on the answer sheet, the clock is the same for everyone, you can close a question once most teams are in, and you can see which phones left the app during a question. Say that at the start and it mostly never comes up.

What it costs

Nothing. No per-seat price, no player cap, no trial to cancel, and nobody playing needs an account or an app. There is nothing to expense.