Reading time: Less than 2 minutes
Do you ever get bored by work-related parties? Maybe you should be the person to suggest some party games that can help make the event more fun — and more productive…
I’ve attended two Christmas/year end parties in the last two weeks. Yes, it’s February. But both workplaces (one was my husband’s office, the other an organization where I hold a major contract) were too busy in December.
My client, who held their event just yesterday, did something very smart. They organized a party game. Now, I’m not typically a person who enjoys games. I dislike cards. I’d rather read a book that play a computer game. I’m allergic to Monopoly.
But organizers intended this game to break the ice. The company has recently hired a number of new employers and while some of us in the group of about 25 people were old hands, many didn’t know each other yet.
So, we were divided into two teams and, each person had to give the game-organizer an interesting and true sentence about themselves. (Mine was: When I was a 16-year-old I did an 80-mile canoe trip with five friends.) The other team had to guess which one of us was the author of the sentence. And each team was to be awarded one point for every correct guess.
Interestingly, there were no correct guesses at all. The score was a 0-0 tie. But did we ever laugh! We also learned a lot about each other. For example, one woman had built a human-size hamster wheel for an art project. Another told us that she viewed Samuri-style films to comfort herself. A third person revealed that she had been told never to sing by her grade 3 teacher — and, afterwards, she sang a few bars of Happy Birthday to demonstrate why. (I thought the teacher had been misguided.)
In any case, the game was brief but tons of fun, even for a non-gamester like me. And it certainly accomplished its goal of helping us get to know each other a little better.
If you ever need to organize a work-related party, consider the idea of using a game like this one. You might even earn the label of “master communicator” if you do.