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Guide

Workplace games

What makes a game work at work — and the three ways they usually go wrong.

The three failure modes

Games at work fail in predictable ways, and all three are about who is watching.

  1. Performance: when playing well is visible to a manager, it stops being a game.
  2. Exclusion: knowledge games favour whoever shares the culture the questions came from.
  3. Obligation: a game you may not skip is an assignment.

What a good one has

A short round, a clear end, and a result that is fun to lose. Anything where losing is embarrassing will quietly shed the people who most needed including.

  1. Short enough to fit in a gap, not a slot.
  2. Skippable without explanation.
  3. Scores that are interesting rather than evaluative — a week that resets beats an all-time table.

Trivia, specifically

Trivia is the easiest to start and the easiest to get wrong, because a question bank encodes whoever wrote it. Breadth is the fix: enough topics that everybody is an expert at something and nobody is an expert at everything. Hearso's bank runs to over two thousand reviewed questions across twelve topics for exactly this reason.

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Never goes backwards. Never lies about being done. Under a second on a good day.

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With your permission, we measure basic game usage, safe button/link interactions, and IP-based traffic data. We do not send your email, name, country, answers, or sign-in tokens to analytics. You can change this in Settings after signing in. Hearso also keeps anonymous totals of rounds, players, and live rooms without this permission; see the player guide.