The ultimate aim of April Fool’s is laughter, joy and camaraderie, right? We need those things more than ever right now. That said, it’s probably not the best time to play tricks on your colleagues and make remote working even harder by messing with tools or broadcasting fake announcements about going back to the office. Instead, do this for April Fool’s: The Silly Challenge.
The Idea
Get your Slackbot to send randomised 'silly challenges' to anyone who DMs the words 'April Fool’s' to themselves in their private Slack. Ask them to share photo or video proof in a Slack channel where everyone can see, and importantly, have a chuckle. It’s optional. It’s easy. It’s active.
The How-To
Open Slack and give yourself 30 minutes to set the fun up by following these steps:
- Add a custom Slackbot response
- Click '+ Add new response'
- In the box on the left, put in your trigger words. I used 'April Fool’s,april fools,fool' to cover my bases.
- Come up with lots of silly challenges. This is the hardest step, but it’s where the magic lies. Here are some ideas we used at OfferZen to kickstart some inspiration:
- Do a silly walk a la John Cleese
- Attempt a handstand, how hard can it be?
- Run around a cup 9 times to work off all that caffeine!
- Drink 500mls of water in 30 seconds because you're a BEAST!!!
- Do a pirouette to prove your ballet game is on pointe!
- Put on your most festive outfit, because it's Wednesday!
- Impersonate party parrot!
- Impersonate the “aw yeah” emoji gif!
- Do the dancing panda emoji dance!
- Do the Doge emoji dance!
- In the box on the right, put each one of your silly challenges on a new line.
- Hit save.
- Post a Slack message to your company to tell them that the challenge has gone live!
Here's the message we sent to our team and some of the results that we got back!
Happy April Fool’s everyone! Introducing... The Silly Challenge!
To play, type the secret password in a Slack DM to yourself, and you’ll get a personalised silly challenge. You must complete the silly challenge, and post photo or video proof on the watercooler channel.
This is not compulsory, but if you type in the password, you must complete the challenge!
Password hint: What day is it today?
If nothing else, it gets a few people up from their desks and moving around, but at best, it gets your whole company laughing. Just be silly. And look out for more remote team connection action plans coming at you very soon!
