Water Cooler Trivia is built with a simple idea: for businesses to conduct virtual quizzes to engage their team, recreating the fun-filled intimacy of physical office space. It originally started as a set of trivia questions in a Google form, put together by co-founder Collin Waldoch to break the monotony at his day job. The quiz quickly won traction and became a weekly affair. Waldoch followed a similar practice during his consequent career and soon realised the unique ability of trivia to bring people together and strengthen relationships. Reminiscent of the UK’s pub quiz culture, trivia enacts several necessary teamwork functions – including healthy competition, intellectual stimuli, and community.
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Today, Water Cooler Trivia is a top-rated app implemented by companies like Amazon, Nike, Lyft, Novartis, and others. You can send trivia questions via email or a conversational interface like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Water Cooler Trivia’s Teams app lets you conduct a weekly trivia contest via Microsoft Teams. It includes reminders, result snapshots, and leaderboards to recreate the whole quiz experience. Let us review these features in more detail.
Inside Water Cooler Trivia for Microsoft Teams
You can add Water Cooler Trivia to your Microsoft Teams interface either from Microsoft AppSource or the company’s product page. Once the app is downloaded, you will be prompted to add the app to a channel of your choice. It’s recommended that you have a dedicated channel for water cooler conversations, so that channel members know precisely where to participate in the latest quiz.
Water Cooler Trivia is free for the first four weeks and will then cost approximately $1 per user per month, billed only for those employees who participate.
Here’s our review of Water Cooler Trivia’s key features:
- Pre-built trivia content – Water Cooler Trivia ships with ready-to-use trivia questionnaires handwritten by experts. This ensures there’s no risk of common questions occurring, as you have 5000+ questions and categories from which to choose. You can select the difficulty level (easy, medium, or hard) and exclude region-specific content (e.g., questions about American history) to keep your quizzes inclusive.
- Scheduling: Water Cooler Trivia lets you schedule the weekly contest per your requirements. You can specify which day of the week the quiz will be sent, when the answers should be due, when the results will be shared, and the specific time of day.
- Contest reminders: When you schedule a weekly trivia contest, participants will receive reminders via the Microsoft Teams channel and a direct message on Teams. Users will be reminded at strategic intervals to increase contest participation rates.
- Result insights: The app is selective about which results it shows and how they are presented. Only the top ten participants are listed to prevent discouraging anyone. In addition to high scores, the funniest responses are also highlighted. Water Cooler Trivia supports team scores to encourage group-based competition. All this is presented as a channel message using emojis, and individuals get their results as direct messages.
- Leaderboard – The leaderboard includes historical data on trivia performance, naming overall first, second, and third-place winners. You will also find category-wise result segmentation and the average number of employees participating in every contest.
- Employee engagement: Water Cooler Trivia has unique techniques to drive engagement in the workplace. For instance, it invites participants to enter smart and funny responses in case they do not know the actual answer to a trivia question. And when an employee gets a problematic question right, they will be asked how they came to see the answer. These life anecdotes are shared on the channel to drive engagement.
- Customisable quiz categories – Water Cooler Trivia supports custom quiz categories written only for your team. This means that you could use the app for a fun, corporate training exercise and other use cases.
Why the Water Cooler Trivia App Makes a Difference
The app brings a unique value proposition and is intuitive in functionality. You don’t need to input credit card information to start the trial, you can invite participants using shareable links, and quizzes are graded using a combination of humans and bots.
What We Think?
For $500 a month, you can add unlimited participants to a weekly quiz – which, we think, is a significant investment.
Download Water Cooler Trivia here.
