A quick guide to mastering inside jokes to make team bonding work
Team bonding is no longer a bi-annual in-person event. Instead, it’s become a never-ending brainstorm and trial and error of “how can we recreate the water cooler”.
For a little over a year, I have been studying and observing the best methodologies for team bonding, and one observation stays true no matter how different the teams look like: the better a team is connected with one another, the more inside jokes they share between each other.
Now, you might be thinking, how hard could it be to get couple of inside jokes going?
It’s VERY hard. Think about how many people or groups you have inside jokes with and soon you’ll realize that inside jokes are scarce and do not come by easily.
So before I share with you the quick guide of mastering inside jokes, let’s make sure we’re on the same page with what an inside joke is.
What is an inside joke?
An inside joke is something that a select group of people, and only those select few people, will ever understand until it is explained to anyone outside of that group. — Urban dictionary
To me, an inside joke is an art form, and something that needs a great deal of finesse. It requires people coming together, sharing experiences, forming a mutual understanding, and then creating a moment. This moment can be as subtle as a wink or a head nod. And only when you have this mutual understanding will an inside joke be created.
Now, what are the ingredients for mastering inside jokes?
You have to be up to date on what’s happening in culture.
It’s Friday night, you have a couple of options: You can rewatch your favorite shows/movies of all time, or you can finally explore what everybody has been talking about: “Squid Game” (even if it might not be your genre, and yes, sorry, this article is already a couple weeks late).
I’m serious…if you’re trying to get in on the inside jokes, drop everything and watch, and by doing so, you will learn the cultural language and lingo that is now.
Understanding cultural phenomenon and being able to have a conversation about it is super valuable and creates quick bonding. And the work doesn’t stop just there: Newest meme? get in it. Just like how we learn a new words by using it in different sentences, using different memes in your life to communicate with your teammates is exactly the same thing.
Similarly, learning proper grammar is just a small part of communicating and being understood in a new country. “When in Rome…(do as the Romans do)” is the exact illustration of what this is. Language is important, but don’t just learn the language; learn the culture so you can CONNECT with people.
Okay, so let’s say you’ve done your cultural homework… you’ve watched the top 5 things that everyone is talking about, you’re aware of all the trending memes, your hashtag game is on point and you are ready to go make some inside jokes. What you need now, is an “Inside Joke Farm”, a space for inside jokes to come alive.
Inside Joke Farm = a team space + bonding cadence + psychological safety
Let me break it down for you:
A team space can come in many different ways, it can be virtual or in-person. It can be your work chat thread, a group channel, a virtual water cooler, or your office garage. It’s important that this space needs to be easily accessible for everyone involved at any moment. In addition, this place needs to have a way to save and store memories, since you’ll need this space to build and grow team culture.
Do you remember way back when we all sat in offices together and you could actually see what was on someone’s desk, the color of their shoes, what their favorite afternoon go-to snack was? It should feel like that. A space where you can visit and get the sense of understanding and belonging.
Bonding cadence is critical to starting an inside joke farm. If we’ve learnt anything during this work from home 18 months is that team bonding requires more than bi-annual team building. What we have is endless zoom calls, but we also need to set aside scheduled time to play together as a team.
Working from home should not mean work only and giving up the essential and often enjoyable bonding time with one another. As humans, we need those casual chats and coffee breaks, even if it they can be unproductive. And we definitely need those karaoke nights, because we are as much hearts, as we are brains.
The last part of the equation is psychological safety. Sorry to all of a sudden sound like your therapist here, but psychological safety plays a huge role in this, so bear with me.
Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that others on the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for speaking up.
— Center for Creative Leadership
This is probably the core of how teams successfully bond, but also the hardest to achieve. Psychological safety also requires a lot of patience and time. Think about how long it took you to share a secret with your best friend when you were just in middle school. You needed to make sure that you had built enough trust that your friend would keep your secret, not judge you for it, not tell anyone else and better yet, even help you through it, if you needed it.
Here’s some examples of inside jokes from teams that share solid psychological safety:
Example 1:
Task: Create a custom ice breaker question for the team to answer.
Custom ice breaker question: “Who do you think is the most beautiful in this team? And why do you think that’s me?”
Example 2:
Manager: “I know I tell you about tiny design bugs I find all the time, but here’s another one…”
Designer: “Thanks, I will add this on the top of the existing 400+ polish item that we will get to when we get some time (sends the giphy).”
Example 3:
Teammate: “Sorry guys, I was the reason why that link is not working.”
Team: “Is this your clone acting up again? Tell him we don’t need him on this project.”
Psychological safety within the inside joke farm enables us to celebrate the faults, not pick at them and bond over life’s successes and failures allowing us to be light-hearted and share laughs as a team.
Which is a nice segue to how to master the inside jokes.
Just let go and have some fun. You have to know how to not take yourself seriously.
“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.” — Berné Brown
Inside jokes cannot exist if you take yourself too seriously and are not ready to make a little fun of yourself. You need to be comfortable with the fact that what you are doing together is silly and you continue to do it, because it is fun. It’s not measured or fake. And while, it might not be the reason you get promoted, it should make work just a bit easier to bare and definitely will make everyone feel like the belong on the same team, especially yourself.
Here are some great resources to grow your own inside joke farms:
- teamrecess.com If you are looking for a one stop shop for team building, this product is the one. It’s free and super easy to use. Once you sign up and create a team, it creates a team chat in Slack, and automatically starts your team on a cadence of answering fun questions together. It also has a team space where you can go down memory lane, and a cool feature where it tells you all the commonalities you have with in your teammates (FYI: I’ve also been working on this product for over a year, creation through GTM).
- donut.com Donut is a nice one if you want to use it with your existing Slack chat channel. They say they are for “connecting serendipitously for virtual coffee, peer learning, DEI discussions, and more” and this is true. It makes meeting new team members outside of your existing circle a bit less awkward. A little downside to this product is that it requires more work on the users to progress (having to schedule and plan for a 1–1, etc) and it does not provide a team space.
- Jackboxgames.com Jackbox is super fun and they are always adding new games for teams to play together. It’s a great place to come together, have fun and really just focus on bonding. If you already have a reoccurring existing team game time, Jackbox is a great choice, especially if you have a team coordinator who can host. A game pack usually costs around $29.99, but only one team member needs to purchase the pack and everyone can participate.
