For Staff Week 2018, I was approached by someone from the Staff Week Committee to organize a team building event inspired by the popular TV game show Family Feud. Of course, I was on board and promptly recruited two other colleagues to be my partners in crime. Together, the three of us set out to organize the first ever Biblio Family Feud!
Rather than use predetermined questions and answers from the Web, we decided that we would create our own questions and send them for staff to answer. We came up with 50 questions total and tried to make them fun and relevant to our Library and staff. We purposefully chose more than we would need for the event, since we left the answers open-ended and therefore didn’t know what our coworkers would come up with. We thought this would add more authenticity for the game and provide fun surprises for everyone.
We ended up having a great response, with over 50 employees providing answers.
From there, we went through the answers to all the questions and came up with categories when possible (e.g. when asking “Where is the best place to grab a coffee on campus?”, if people answered “Tim Hortons” and “Timmies”, we would have grouped these together). In the end, we chose the 20 “best” questions and found an open PowerPoint slide deck that someone had customized to the look and music of Family Feud, where we could enter in our own questions/answers.
For the event itself, I co-hosted with one of the other organizers and had a blast. In total, there were 8 teams of 4 competing, and a large audience of staff in attendance. The game was a big success, not only for the surprise answers from the contestants, but also for everyone to see the “top answers” as provided by the employees themselves.
In the end, it turned out to be quite a lot of planning and coordinating to prepare and carry out this event, but it was a great way to learn more about each other through a gamified experience, promote team building, and share some genuine laughs.
Here are a few pictures of the event:
