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59 free Team Building trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 59 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 02What did the three Ms in 3M originally stand for?
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing began in 1902 at Two Harbors, Minnesota, trying to mine corundum; it failed and pivoted to sandpaper, tape and eventually sticky notes.
Q 03US 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 04International Workers' Day on 1 May commemorates the 1886 Haymarket affair, a rally for the eight-hour day, in which US city?
Chicago
Chicago's rally ended with a bomb and gunfire; the date was chosen to honor the workers who died.
Q 05Which carmaker switched its factory workers to a five-day, 40-hour week in 1926?
Ford
Henry Ford argued that workers with free time and money would buy more cars, including his.
Q 06The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised in the 1870s by a newspaper editor living in which US state?
Wisconsin
Christopher Latham Sholes worked on his typewriter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between 1867 and 1873; his layout has survived every attempt since to replace it.
Q 07The 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 08Which country led the world in coffee consumption per person throughout the 2010s?
Finland
Finland led per-capita coffee consumption throughout the 2010s at about 12 kg per person a year; two coffee breaks a day are written into many Finnish union contracts.
Q 09In The Office, Dunder Mifflin's branch is in which Pennsylvania city?
Scranton
The real Scranton embraced the show; the city's welcome sign appears in the opening credits.
Q 10In 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 11The Googleplex headquarters is in which California city?
Mountain View
The Googleplex sits at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, a campus Google has occupied since 2004 and famous for its free cafeterias.
Q 12Who co-founded LinkedIn, the professional network launched in 2003?
Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, which launched from his living room on May 5, 2003; Microsoft bought it in 2016 for $26.2 billion.
Q 13In which occupied country were paper clips worn on lapels as a WWII resistance symbol?
Norway
The clips signaled unity ('we are bound together'), and wearing one could get you arrested.
Q 21Which 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 22A garage in Palo Alto known as the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley' is where which company started?
Hewlett-Packard
Bill Hewlett slept in the shed while the newly married Packards took the apartment, and they built their first products in the garage in 1938.
Q 23In which city did the first Starbucks open in 1971?
Seattle
The first Starbucks opened at 2000 Western Avenue in Seattle in 1971 and moved to Pike Place Market in 1976; for years it sold only whole beans and equipment, no lattes.
Q 14Elisha Otis's 1853 safety device made which machine safe enough for tall buildings?
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 15Which symbol did Ray Tomlinson choose in 1971 to separate the username from the machine name in the first email addresses?
@
The @ sign was on the keyboard, appeared in no names, and already meant 'at', and it has been used in email addresses ever since.
Q 16Slack began as an internal tool at a company that was building what?
An online game
Tiny Speck's game Glitch flopped, but the chat tool its developers built for themselves became a $27.7 billion company.
Q 17Zoom founder Eric Yuan left which company in 2011 to start it?
Cisco
Eric Yuan had been a Cisco vice president of engineering for Webex, which Cisco bought in 2007; he left in 2011 with about 40 engineers to found Zoom.
Q 18PowerPoint was created by which small company before Microsoft bought it in 1987?
Forethought
Forethought, Inc. released PowerPoint 1.0 for the Macintosh on April 20, 1987; Microsoft bought the company that July for about $14 million.
Q 19Who created the office comic strip Dilbert?
Scott Adams
Scott Adams launched Dilbert in 1989, giving the world the Pointy-Haired Boss and Dogbert, the smartest dog on Earth.
Q 20In which US state did a 1960s Fashion Guild campaign start what became 'Casual Friday'?
Hawaii
The Hawaii Fashion Guild lobbied employers to let men wear aloha shirts on Fridays; the habit spread east and reached the mainland by the 1990s.
Q 24In which decade did Herbert Freudenberger publish the paper that popularized 'burn-out'?
1970s
His 1974 paper 'Staff Burn-Out' described exhaustion among volunteers at a free clinic in New York.
Q 25According 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 26Parkinson'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 27Which 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 28László Bíró, who patented the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, was born in which country?
Hungary
Bíró was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1899 and emigrated to Argentina in 1940, where ballpoints came to be called biromes in his honor.
Q 29What is Homer Simpson's job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant?
Safety inspector
Homer is the safety inspector in Sector 7G; he got the job in the season-one episode 'Homer's Odyssey' after campaigning for safety in Springfield.
Q 30In 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.'