The new Trivia for MS Teams and Slack is an easy way to engage your work teams and give them an outlet to blow off a little steam. In lieu of in-person trivia nights or team lunches, Trivia for MS Teams is a fun way for colleagues to bond, with a dash of healthy competition sprinkled in. Virtual teams may have fun with a few minutes of downtime, provided it’s timed properly.
The Trivia app also offers quizzes and word games that teams can play together. It takes only a few seconds to set up this new function, and a few more to launch it. First, you search for the Trivia app in Microsoft, then sign into MS account. Go to the Trivia dashboard. Next, you will select a team to assign the Trivia bot to, and it will be set up for all channels for that team. That’s the setup in a nutshell.
To launch the app and schedule quizzes, open MS Teams and go into your general write @Trivia to command the game scheduler to open. The Trivia bot will pop up with suggestions. Click on the function to select a quiz. The popup windows will guide you through the set up at that point. You get to set the time, days, category, difficulty, duration, and frequency of Trivia quizzes. It can be a nice breather for a busy team, a stress reliever during intense projects, or merely a reminder to your teams to take some time to relax.
With more than 30 categories to choose from and 28,000 questions programmed into the Trivia platform, the questions should stay pretty fresh. When the game is launched, anyone on the team who is free can play, no pressure. Trivia for MS Teams and Slack gives users the opportunity to make their own custom quizzes, useful for personalizing the questions to the individuals or to teach or remind people about company history or interesting facts.
Trivia also provides other games in the app, including Word Jumble, where teams arrange the letters of a jumbled word to create a real word as quickly as possible. (Un)popular opinion, where team members weigh in with their hot takes on a popular or unpopular opinion, could also be fun. MS Teams is offering a 14-day free pro trial.
While we are striving to connect while working remotely, this simple, secure diversion during the work day can help lighten the mood and bring people together, even briefly, with something enjoyable.
Joleen Jernigan is an ever-curious writer, grammar nerd, and social media strategist with a background in training, education, and educational publishing. A native Texan, Joleen has traveled extensively, worked in six countries, and holds an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language. She lives in Austin and constantly seeks out the best the city has to offer.
