It has been more than a year since COVID has started. It has been a year, depending on where you are, where we are seeing our friends less and less. If you are like me, you have been hired, onboarded, and started your career at your location all with only having Scrums and the occasional conversation as a means to get to know your co-workers.
Let’s take a step back from our normal How-To's and user guides to try something a little more fun! I know there are many different games you can play using screen share, but let’s test our knowledge, and create three games we can create using only Microsoft 365 products.
Microsoft Teams Bingo
Have you ever been in meetings and notice some small ticks, or behaviors that you think are goofy, funny, or just super common? Well, here is your chance to make a bingo card out of it!
The first thing that we are going to need to do is make a 5X5 bingo card using Microsoft Word. This is super quick, just open up Word, click on insert, select table, and make it 5X5.
You can then size them to standard bingo size. There are two ways that you can go about making the card. You can make it yourself for each person, or the way I believe would add a little fun, is by getting each employee participating to make their own and share them with the team. A Bloom Software bingo card may look something like this:
You can then either do one meeting, or a series of meetings to try and find the winner by either doing a full card, a line, or any other configuration you can come up with.
Together Mode Guess Who
Using Together Mode is a great way to create your own little Guess Who board. If you don’t know what Guess Who is, it is a game where someone selects a mystery person, and you ask questions to determine who the mystery person could be.
When playing with your team, you can use more than just physical appearances, you can use things such as “does your person disc golf?”. How it is going to work is you are going to have your meeting, go into together mode, and someone will select a person.
The players will then turn their cameras off as they get asked until you get to the final person, which is the person that was selected. This is a great way to get to know your team a little better, and a great introduction to everyone.
Teams Pictionary
The last game we are going to look at today is Teams Pictionary. The rules are quite simple, you will split off into teams, then either use a word you have predetermined, or a Pictionary generator, to select a word. The team then draws the word, while their team has 60 seconds to guess it, if they are correct, they get a point.
To have a space to draw, we are going to use the Whiteboard feature of our Teams meetings. To get to the whiteboard, we will need to click on “Share Screen” and then select the whiteboard feature.
While Microsoft 365 does allow for amazing collaboration and the ability to work together, we have to remember that there can be fun to be had with the work environment that we have been handed, and that everyone has done such an amazing job adapting to. Please everyone, stay safe, and remember to have a little bit of fun in your workday.
