PULTEVENT
Trivia for work teams: 7 rounds that mix departments
Twelve thirty in the big meeting room. Sandwich platters on the side table, a flip chart nobody has touched since the offsite, and Legal sitting as far from the warehouse crew as the chairs allow. Thirty minutes later a paralegal and a forklift driver are high-fiving over a question about the year the company moved buildings. That's the job trivia does at work when you set it up right.
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Office managers and HR people ask me the same thing: how do we get departments talking without another awkward icebreaker? My answer is a quiz where the teams are deliberately mixed and the questions reward knowing the company, not knowing the capital of Burkina Faso. Put it on the projector, let people answer from their phones, and keep it short enough to finish before the afternoon meetings.
Below are seven round types I use for work trivia, a thirty-minute lunch version and a longer one for an all-hands or a team day. You run everything from a laptop browser; colleagues scan a QR code and answer on their own phones, no app and no login. Their phones need internet, so check the office Wi-Fi reaches the room you've booked.
Seven round types for office trivia
1 How well do you know the company?
Questions about your own organization: the first product, the founding city, what the old logo looked like, how many offices there are now. Multiple choice, answered on phones.
How to run it. Ask the longest-serving person in the building for five facts. Then check them with someone in marketing, because long-serving people remember generously.
Veterans get to show off, new starters get a crash course, and both end up talking to each other about it.
2 Put it in order
The Timeline round shows events from the company's life, and teams arrange them in the right sequence. First hire, first big client, the move, the rebrand, the year the coffee machine finally got fixed.
How to run it. Keep the gaps between dates reasonable. If two events happened the same month, one of them doesn't belong in the round.
Ordering sparks conversation in a way that a single right answer doesn't. Teams have to agree, and that's the team building.
3 Who wrote this fact?
Guess the Guest shows a fun fact collected from a colleague in advance, and phones guess which colleague it belongs to. Ran a marathon in a banana costume. Once sold a car to a TV presenter.
How to run it. Ask for one fact per person through a private form and make it clear that 'pass' is an acceptable answer.
This round does the actual mixing. People walk out knowing one surprising thing about someone from another floor.
4 The category board
Super Smarts lays out categories and point values on the projector. Teams choose where to play: your products, industry jargon, local area, the year the company was founded, general knowledge.
How to run it. Rotate the captain every pick so the quiet engineer gets a turn to choose as well as the loud salesperson.
Choice gives teams a strategy, and strategy is where cross-department teams start to lean on each other's knowledge.
5 Speaking our language
Every company invents its own acronyms. Show one on screen and let phones pick what it stands for from four options, one real and three plausible.
How to run it. Mix acronyms from different departments so everyone has one they know and five they don't.
It's funny, it's genuinely useful to new hires, and it quietly shows how much each team lives in its own dialect.
6 Lightning general knowledge
Ten fast questions with a short timer. Nothing about the company, just a palate cleanser so people who joined last week can score too.
How to run it. Use it as the opener in the long version and the closer in the lunch version.
A round with no insider advantage keeps the game fair for new starters and contractors.
7 Scores and awards
The team scoreboard adds everything up and the awards ceremony picks titles from the stats. Every team gets one, and you can rename any of them beforehand.
How to run it. Let a senior person hand over the winners' prize, then leave the room before the speeches start.
Ending on recognition rather than a raw ranking means the team in last place still leaves in a good mood.
Mixed teams, one screen
Each team gets people from three or four departments. The scoreboard shows team names, not department names, so nobody is defending their turf.
Company knowledge counts
Write rounds about your history, products and people in the quiz builder. New starters learn more in twenty minutes than from a slide deck.
Scored automatically
Answers from phones are counted as they arrive. You read the next question instead of marking the last one.
Awards at the end
The awards screen finds something for every team, so the lunch ends with applause rather than a shrug.
The thirty-minute lunch version
Three minutes to scan in and settle. Eight minutes on the company round. Six on Guess the Guest. Five on Timeline. Five on lightning questions. Three for the scoreboard and awards. That's it, and people are back at their desks by one.
Keep teams to five or six. Any bigger and two people do all the answering while the rest eat. For a bigger room, add teams rather than people.
The longer version for a team day
With an hour, use all seven rounds and put the category board in the middle, where energy tends to dip. Add a short break before the last two rounds. At a team day I often run the quiz straight after lunch, which is the slot everybody else refuses, and it holds the room better than a presentation would.
A points board plus a timeline round makes the hour feel varied. Five rounds of the same multiple choice would not, however good the questions are.
Mixing teams without it feeling forced
Don't ask people to form their own teams. They'll sit with their own department every time. Instead, set teams in advance with one person from each area, and give each team a neutral name. Put the list on screen at the start so people can find each other.
One rule I keep: no team should have two managers from the same line. It stops one person running the table.
If a team is short a person on the day, merge it. Nobody minds, and a slightly bigger team beats a lonely one.
What the setup needs
A laptop with a browser, the meeting room projector or screen over HDMI, and internet. Colleagues' phones need internet too, from the office network or mobile data. There is no offline mode, so if the basement room has no signal, book another room.
The host console is being localized into English, and each guest sees their phone in their own language. Built-in quiz decks are mostly Russian today, which for office trivia makes little difference: the rounds worth playing at work are the ones you write about your own company in the builder.
Cost and the demo
Run a practice lunch on the free 3-day demo, no card needed. If it earns a place in your calendar, you buy a one-time license, not a subscription. Current prices are at https://pultevent.ru/en/, and the demo starts at https://pultevent.ru/login.html?mode=register&next=/app/
About the author
PULTEVENT was built by Ruslan Barashkin, who has hosted events since 2014: more than 500 weddings, office parties and birthdays. TOP 100 Awards named him best host in Moscow in 2024 and in Saint Petersburg in 2023, and he still runs his own nights from this console. More at pultevent.ru/en.
How to run trivia for work teams
- 1
Book a room with a projector and a thirty-minute or one-hour slot.
- 2
Collect company facts and one personal fact per colleague through a private form.
- 3
Build the rounds in the quiz builder and set up mixed teams with neutral names.
- 4
Connect the laptop, open the stage window on the projector and test a phone on the office Wi-Fi.
- 5
Show the QR code and the team list on screen while people arrive.
- 6
Play the rounds, show the scoreboard, run the awards and let everyone get back to work.
FAQ
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See also
Run brighter events — with PULTEVENT
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