What Your Office Pool Says About Your Culture (More Than You'd Think)
Office pools and workplace games reveal more about your culture than your engagement survey does. Here's what to look for — and why it matters.
GAMES & ACTIVITIES
Marcus Webb
6/12/20263 min read
A senior director told me recently that their team had great culture. I asked how they knew. She said, "We do a lot of fun stuff. We just ran an NCAA bracket pool and everyone participated."
I didn't push back in the moment — it wasn't the right conversation for it. But I've been thinking about it since, because she was both right and missing the point at the same time.
The bracket pool didn't prove the culture was good. But if you'd looked more carefully at how the bracket pool ran — who participated, who felt left out, who made jokes that landed wrong, how the winner was acknowledged — you would have learned more about that team's actual culture than any survey question would tell you.
Office Games as Cultural Diagnostics
Here's what I mean. When you run a shared game or pool in an office — an NFL Survivor Pool, a baby shower guessing game, a March Madness bracket — you create what social psychologists call an "intergroup contact" scenario: a context where people interact across their normal boundaries of role, seniority, and department. And in those interactions, the dynamics of your culture don't disappear. They just become more visible.
In a psychologically safe environment — which Harvard professor Amy Edmondson defines as one where people feel they can speak up, take risks, and be themselves without fear of punishment — games are genuinely fun. People tease each other across levels. The entry-level coordinator who nailed every NFL pick gets to crow about it to the VP who went 0-for-4. The hierarchy bends a little, and people enjoy it, because the culture has enough trust and warmth to hold that moment safely.
In a culture where psychological safety is low, you see something different. Participation is uneven — some employees hang back, not because they don't like sports, but because they're not sure they're actually welcome in the shared space. Humor cuts differently. People are careful about what they say. The game technically runs, but the connective tissue isn't there.
I've seen both. They don't look the same.
Specific Things Worth Watching
If you want to use games and shared activities as a genuine cultural tool — and not just a morale-boost checkbox — here are the signals worth paying attention to:
Who opts out, and why. Some people genuinely aren't interested in a specific game, and that's fine. But if the people opting out are disproportionately from one demographic, one department, or one level of the org, that's worth understanding. It may mean the activity wasn't designed inclusively. It may mean those employees don't feel part of the "in" group that gets to play. Either way, the opt-out pattern is data.
How the winner is treated. In healthy cultures, the person who wins an office pool gets a moment — some lighthearted ribbing, some genuine congratulations — regardless of who they are. If the celebration of a winner is uneven — louder when it's a senior person, quieter when it's someone lower on the org chart — that tells you something about whose wins the culture actually values.
Whether remote or hybrid employees can participate equally. If your game infrastructure only works for people who are physically in the office, you've built an activity that reinforces the in-group/out-group divide that hybrid work already creates. In 2025 and beyond, this isn't a minor operational detail. It's an equity question.
Whether anyone is excluded by the activity's premise. A baby pool is a wonderful tradition — but not if it's the only shared activity and your office skews young and childless. Sports pools are great — but not if they're the only format and a meaningful portion of your team has no connection to that sport. Variety matters, not because you can please everyone at once, but because over time, everyone should feel like something was designed for them.
The Bigger Picture
I want to be clear about something: I am not saying office games are a substitute for doing the real work of building psychological safety. They're not. You can't run a bracket pool and call it a DEI initiative. The structural work — equitable performance practices, fair access to opportunities, managers who address problems rather than minimize them — none of that is replaced by a fun activity.
What I am saying is that a well-designed, inclusive office game — run in a culture that supports it — does something that most HR programs can't easily replicate: it creates a shared experience where people forget, briefly, that they're performing their job title. And in that space, genuine human connection happens. That connection builds the trust that psychological safety requires.
The bracket pool didn't prove the culture was good. But it might have helped build it — and if you'd paid attention, it would have told you a lot about where the work still needs to happen.
What are you running in your office right now that's giving you that kind of information? And are you actually using it?
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