How to run a work Christmas quiz, in the office or on a call

Someone has to run the office Christmas quiz, and this year it's you. The good news: a work quiz is easier than a pub quiz, because you know the room. The bad news: half the team might be on a video call, the sales floor will want to win too much, and somebody will Google. Here's how to run it in the office, on a call, or both at once, from the people who host quizzes for a living.

First, decide the setup

Everything else follows from where people are.

• In the room. The easiest. Teams at tables, one person reading, answer sheets on paper. You can do physical rounds: a taste test, a drawing round, a sculpture made of wrapping paper.
• On a video call. Harder, but fine if you plan for the call rather than pretending it's a room. Shorter, tighter, with a clear way for teams to talk privately and hand in answers.
• Hybrid. The hardest, because the room always wins. People in the office hear each other, laugh at the same jokes and confer by glancing across the table; people on the call get a laptop microphone pointed at the ceiling. The fix is to treat the call as its own team or teams, with their own private channel and their own answer form, and to put the questions on screen so nobody has to hear them.

If you can get most of the team into one room, do. If you can't, run it all on the call, office people included, each on their own laptop. A quiz that's fair to everyone beats one that's great for two-thirds of them.

Rounds that work at work

Five or six rounds of ten is plenty. Mix the kind of thinking, not just the topic, so different people carry their team in different rounds.

1. Christmas general knowledge. The warm-up. Traditions, carols, the Twelve Days. Our 50 Christmas quiz questions with answers are free to use: take a round, or mix and match.
2. The picture round about your company. The one people remember in January. Baby photos of the leadership team, the office in its first year, a close-up of someone's desk plant. Ask people for photos a week ahead and keep the sources quiet.
3. Christmas number ones. Play five seconds of the intro; name the song or the year. It works on a call if you share your computer's sound, not your microphone.
4. Closest To. How many sprouts does Britain eat at Christmas? How many emails did the company send this year? Nobody needs the exact answer, so nobody can Google their way to an advantage, and the quiet accountant wins it.
5. Something you have to do, not know. In the room: a blindfolded taste test of Christmas sweets, or a drawing round where one person draws and the team guesses. On a call: a show-and-tell round, where the first team to hold something up to the camera (a bauble, a Christmas jumper, a sprout) takes the point.
6. A music or quickfire finale. Finish on something fast and noisy, never the hardest round.

Timing

For an in-room quiz after lunch or before the bar, an hour is right: five rounds of about ten minutes, a short break for marking. For an evening do, an hour to ninety minutes before people would rather be dancing.

On a call, take a third off. Attention on a video call runs out faster than in a room, and the pauses feel longer. Forty-five minutes to an hour, four rounds, and a five-minute break in the middle so people can get a drink and come back. Send the invite with a hard finish time and stick to it.

Teams across departments

The point of a work quiz is that people talk to people they don't usually talk to. Left to themselves, departments sit together. So:

• Pick the teams in advance, four to six people each, one from each department where you can. Name them something Christmassy rather than "Team 3".
• Give every team a captain who hands in the answers. On a call this matters most: one person typing, everyone else talking.
• Spread the senior people out. One director per team, at most, and not on the team with their own reports.
• On a call, use breakout rooms (Zoom and Teams both have them) for each team to confer, and pull everyone back to the main room for the questions and the scores. Set the rooms up before the quiz, not during it.

Scoring on a call

Paper answer sheets don't work on a call, and reading out answers with everyone unmuted is chaos. What works:

• One answer form per team per round. A shared document or a simple online form, filled in by the captain, closed when the round ends. Or the captain sends the round's answers to the quizmaster in a private chat message, numbered one to ten.
• A second person to mark. You can't read questions and mark at the same time on a call. Ask a colleague to be the scorer and keep the tally in a spreadsheet.
• Show the scoreboard between rounds. Share your screen for thirty seconds. It keeps the bottom teams trying and the top ones nervous.
• Read the answers before you show the scores. "The Christmas number one in 1973 was... Slade." Reveal the answer at the end of the sentence; people shout it at their screens, which is half the fun.

The pitfalls, and how to avoid them

Googling. Assume it will happen, especially on a call where nobody can see anyone's other window. Don't police it; make it pointless. Put most of the points in rounds that can't be searched: the picture round about your company, Closest To, the music intros, the show-and-tell round. Add a timer to the trivia. Our guide to making your quiz phone-proof has the full set of tricks.

Mute chaos. On a call, ask everyone to stay muted in the main room, with only the quizmaster speaking. Teams talk in their breakout rooms. Say this at the start, with a smile, and again after the first round. Have a backup plan for the person whose audio fails: they can type answers to their captain.

One loud table. Every office has one. In the room, they're the team that shouts answers across to everyone else, argues every half-mark and drowns out the quiz. Three fixes: a rule at the start that shouted answers forfeit the point; a microphone for the quizmaster so you never have to compete; and splitting the loud ones across teams before the night, which is easier than calming them during it.

The quiz about the quizmaster's own interests. Write questions for the whole room, not for people like you. If a question would only be answered by your own team, cut it.

Running long. Every round takes longer than you think. Count the questions, time yourself reading them, and drop a round if you're behind. Nobody ever complained a quiz finished on time.

Your night, checked

• Teams set and names given out the day before.
• Questions and answers printed for you, and a second copy for the scorer.
• For the room: answer sheets, pens, a microphone if there are more than about thirty people.
• For a call: breakout rooms built, answer forms ready, the music tested through screen-share.
• Prizes: something for the winners and something for the last-placed team. The wooden spoon gets more laughs than the trophy.

For the full step-by-step on writing and running a quiz, see how to host a quiz night. And if the quiz is one part of a bigger party, our Christmas party page has the hosted quiz, Treachery! and the games night side by side, with prices, and the Christmas quiz page shows the rounds we run.