Team Building Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
106 free Team Building trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This is teambuilding trivia written for the room you are actually in: a kickoff, an all-hands, a virtual happy hour or a hotel ballroom with two hundred people and a microphone. Every question is work related without being about your work, so nobody has a home-field advantage. Expect the accidental invention of the Post-it note, the game studio that spawned Slack, the carmaker that started with looms, the first item ever sold on eBay, and the pulp mill that became a phone giant. The set is built for large groups. Questions are multiple choice, so shy players can still commit to an answer, and the difficulty climbs from easy warm-ups to a handful of genuine stumpers that split the room. Run it as team-versus-team rounds, read it aloud with a scorekeeper, use five questions as trivia for team meetings, or send everyone the link and compare scores at the end. Every answer was checked against an encyclopedia entry or a primary source before publishing, so you will not have to referee an argument about whether the host got it wrong.
30 of 106 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What color were the original Post-it Notes?
Canary yellow
Canary yellow was an accident: the lab next door to the Post-it team at 3M happened to have scrap paper of that shade, so the first notes were made on it.
Q 02US Labor Day, first celebrated with a New York City parade in 1882, falls on the first Monday of which month?
September
September; the first parade, on September 5, 1882, was organized by the Central Labor Union.
Q 03International Workers' Day on 1 May commemorates the 1886 Haymarket affair, a rally for the eight-hour day, in which US city?
Chicago
Chicago: after a bomb broke up the Haymarket rally, four defendants were hanged, and in 1893 Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the survivors, calling the trial unfair.
Q 04Which carmaker switched its factory workers to a five-day, 40-hour week in 1926?
Ford
Ford: Henry Ford said it was 'high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.'
Q 05Which gunmaker built the first typewriters to use Christopher Sholes's QWERTY keyboard layout?
Remington
Remington: Sholes sold his patent rights to the gunsmiths for $12,000 in 1873, and the first machines went on the market the next year.
Q 06The word 'robot' entered English from R.U.R., a 1920 play about artificial workers written in which language?
Czech
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) was written in Czech by Karel Čapek, whose brother Josef suggested the word 'robot', from robota, meaning forced labor.
Q 07In The Office, Dunder Mifflin's branch is in which Pennsylvania city?
Scranton
Scranton: to research his role, John Krasinski visited a real paper company there, and footage from that trip appears in the opening credits.
Q 08In Office Space, what brand is Milton's cherished red stapler?
Swingline
The company did not sell a red stapler at the time; the prop was spray-painted, and fan demand made Swingline release one in 2002.
Q 09Which office product did Dallas secretary Bette Nesmith Graham, mother of the Monkees' Michael Nesmith, invent?
Liquid Paper
Liquid Paper began as white tempera paint Graham brushed over her typing errors, and in 1979 she sold her company to Gillette.
Q 10Who co-founded LinkedIn, the professional network launched in 2003?
Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman: after Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, he joined Microsoft's own board of directors.
Q 11In which occupied country were paper clips worn on lapels as a WWII resistance symbol?
Norway
Norway: patriots who wore one on a lapel risked harsh punishment.
Q 12Elisha Otis invented a safety brake that made which machine safe to ride?
The elevator
Otis's safety brake stops an elevator if the hoisting rope fails; he demonstrated it at the 1854 New York Crystal Palace exhibition by having the rope cut while he stood aboard.
Q 13Ray Tomlinson's 1971 program, which put the @ sign in email addresses, sent messages across which network?
ARPANET
ARPANET: Tomlinson picked the @ sign because it did not appear in anyone's user name.
Q 21In which city did the first Starbucks open in 1971?
Seattle
Seattle: the first Starbucks opened at 2000 Western Avenue in 1971, and for a decade its stores sold only beans and equipment, not coffee drinks.
Q 22According to the Peter principle, every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to their level of what?
Incompetence
Laurence J. Peter's 1969 book The Peter Principle argued that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence; it was written as satire.
Q 23Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill what?
The time available
'Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,' C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in a 1955 Economist essay mocking how bureaucracies grow regardless of workload.
Q 14Which workplace chat app grew out of an in-house tool built by the makers of the online game Glitch?
Slack
Slack: Stewart Butterfield's earlier failed game had already spun off Flickr, and when Glitch failed too, its in-house chat tool became the product.
Q 15Zoom founder Eric Yuan left which company in 2011 to start it?
Cisco
Cisco: Yuan had worked on Webex there, and years earlier he reached Silicon Valley only after eight failed attempts to get a US visa.
Q 16Microsoft bought the Silicon Valley startup Forethought in 1987 to get which program?
PowerPoint
PowerPoint was going to be called Presenter, until a last-minute trademark check found that the name was already taken.
Q 17Who created the office comic strip Dilbert?
Scott Adams
Scott Adams worked his office day job at Pacific Bell until 1995, drawing Dilbert outside working hours.
Q 18In which US state did a 1960s office dress custom start what became 'Casual Friday'?
Hawaii
Hawaii: in one of two origin stories for Casual Friday, 'Aloha Friday' let office workers swap mainland-style business wear for aloha shirts.
Q 19Which company is nicknamed 'Big Blue'?
IBM
IBM's blue logo and its old unofficial uniform of white shirts with blue suits earned the name.
Q 20A garage in Palo Alto known as the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley' is where which company started?
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard: Bill Hewlett and David Packard settled the order of their names with a coin toss.
Q 24Which company introduced the 914, the first successful plain-paper photocopier, in 1959?
Xerox
The machine was so popular that 'to xerox' became a verb, to the company's lawyers' dismay.
Q 25László Bíró, who patented the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, was born in which country?
Hungary
Hungary: Bíró later moved to Argentina at the invitation of President Agustín Justo and set up a company there to make his pens.
Q 26What is Homer Simpson's job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant?
Safety inspector
Safety inspector: in 'Homer's Odyssey', Homer is fired after crashing a cart, becomes a safety crusader, and is then made the plant's safety inspector.
Q 27In which year did Nike adopt the slogan 'Just Do It'?
1988
Nike launched 'Just Do It' in 1988; Wieden+Kennedy's Dan Wieden coined it, inspired by the last words of death-row inmate Gary Gilmore, 'Let's do it.'
Q 28Which burger chain did a milkshake-mixer salesman buy from its founding brothers in 1961?
McDonald's
McDonald's: Ray Kroc first visited the brothers' San Bernardino stand in 1954 to see why it was using eight of his Multimixers.
Q 29Pawnee, the town in Parks and Recreation, is in which state?
Indiana
Indiana: Leslie Knope is only deputy director of Pawnee's parks department; her boss, Ron Swanson, wants as little government as possible.
Q 30Which electronics giant's co-founder built an electric rice cooker that mostly failed to cook rice properly?
Sony
Sony: its first tape recorders, launched a few years later, barely sold at first because customers didn't know how they would use them.