Bringing Fun to Team room

I am big believer of encouraging teams to laugh and have fun together. In my mind it builds team's resilience.

Is it easy! NO WAY!!! It is the most difficult think to achieve when you are around bunch of engineers. I have been part of mora than 30+ teams so far and half of my team member appreciated being left alone to code. 

I never give up and have lots of different post standup.  I have few categories

Sheer Fun:

• Trivia after standup -  Pick a topic or theme for a week and ask one  trivia question after standup. Provide team all the details along with the answer. This way team is learning and having fun. Great for co-located and distributed teams. 
• One Urban Dictionary word of the day - Open the webpage and ask the team to put hands together. Read the word and meaning together and say the word loudly at the end. Like sports team does. Distributed Team members can do the same as well. 
• 15 seconds warmup - Pick any song with steps from youtube and jam together. Perfect for all teams.
• Shake up - There are lots of games on PlanningForFailure website. These are a minute long and perfect for teams
• Lifting weight: Start with 5lbs weight as standup token and then increase the weight slowly every iteration by 2 or 5 lbs. This will make your team strong every day and will not let them talk longer as well. 

Games for Late comers but can also be played on regular basis:

• Sing a song in local language or some funny song
• Tell a chuck norris joke 
• Bring some sort of treats (donuts or cookies or fruits) 
• Sit on a broken chair or wear a kind of hat entire day. 
• 5 Sit-ups or push-up for every minute you are late
• Facilitate the scrum next day

These are the few things which I have tried in my teams. Let me know if you have done something interesting and fun :).

Enjoy!

Manisha

Extrasss: I play games before Demo and Retrospective all the times as well. I get my ideas from http://www.funretrospectives.com/ and http://plans-for-retrospectives.com/?id=3-86-26-61-40 and tasty cupcakes site.