Musical Shares

I don't get energy from spending time with people.

You might think that that sort of classic introversion means that I mostly keep to myself, but the reality is that I often look for and subsequently find opportunities to organise and run social activities, especially at work.

Why engineer a situation for myself that I know is going to be mentally and emotionally exhausting?

I think it's because I don't want work to just be about work.

If you're going to spend a huge chunk of your waking hours interacting with people, there is value in spending some of that time getting to know them a little bit better and actually having some fun every now and then.

I've written about social stuff a few times before, so if you want to read more about my thoughts on the matter, feel free to go and explore that rabbit hole.

Meanwhile, I've got another game you can play.

It's called Musical Shares.

The premise is simple: get to know people through their musical preferences.

To get started, everyone submits a few songs of their choosing that align with some sort of theme explained by the facilitator.

The theme I used was that the person had to legitimately like the song in question, but if you could also get people to submit songs that have some special meaning to them or that they associate with a particularly strong memory. The point is that the songs have some relationship to the person, which is important for the rest of the game.

Speaking of which, once you have a musical contribution from all of the participants, you get everyone together and then go through the songs in a random order, playing them (or snippets of them) and getting everyone to guess which person submitted them.

Conversation is encouraged, with people questioning music choices, throwing out some good-natured ribbing or just generally vibing to the excellent choices that their colleagues have made.

At the end, the person who guessed the most songs correctly gets a prize.

Thematically it's very similar to the fridge game, in that it is a structured opportunity to learn more about the people that you work with, like what sort of music that they enjoy.

Music is pretty universal as well, so it's rare for someone not to be able to immediately pick a few songs that meet the necessary criteria.

I ran this game just last week with a group of relatively senior leads in Atlassian and while it wasn't quite the smash hit that the fridge game was, it was still highly regarded, with even people who tend to shun virtual social activities joining in and staying engaged for the whole hour.

So yeah, if you're looking for something lightweight to run with a group of your remote colleagues, I highly recommend this.

Plus, you might get some new tunes to listen to out of the bargain.