- 89% of employees who work remotely
say they feel isolated from the rest of their team.
People are missing those casual social conversations
that they get at work,
those hallway conversations.
In fact, a University of Western Ontario study
found that those water cooler conversations,
even though they have nothing to do with work,
actually contribute to greater productivity
in the workplace.
Those casual conversations are essential, it turns out,
when it comes to building greater collaboration
in the workplace, in terms of building trust at work
and in terms of breaking down those dreaded silos
where people work alone with that bunker mentality.
So here are a few ways you can be more intentional
about creating some opportunities
for your virtual remote employees to connect socially.
Number one, build some pre-meeting time into your agenda
for people who want to, just make it optional,
for people who wanna come on early,
say 15 minutes before your official meetings start,
to just have some time to connect socially.
You see, we used to do that in meeting rooms,
where people would come in and gather,
and you'd go, "Hey, Bob brought donuts, look at that.
"Bob's so cool, Bob's a hero."
We don't have that anymore.
So set aside a little time
before your official meeting starts
for people who wanna come in
and have that little bit of a social exchange.
Number two, and more and more companies are doing this,
build this into your agenda.
So set aside the first 10 minutes of your meeting agenda
for just social time.
Or if you have a really long meeting,
have a networking break in the middle of your meeting,
or allow, people to hang out
after the official meeting is over.
And again, you can make it optional
where those people who wanna hang on
for another 10, 15, 20 minutes to chat
and catch up with their coworkers
have the opportunity to do so.
Number three, if your platform allows it,
make use of the breakout rooms.
They're there for a reason,
and they can help you have much richer conversations,
more meaningful conversations
when people get separated into smaller groups.
You know, we know from research
that even when meeting size is more than just six people,
introverts, shy people tend to say less.
They tend to keep to themselves more.
So this is an opportunity for everyone
to feel a little more comfortable
when you put them into breakout rooms.
You can just use the random feature
so everybody just gets randomly put
into a breakout room of four people
so they can have a more intimate social conversation.
You can leave it completely unstructured,
or you could suggest a few questions
to get the conversation going.
And you can even have some theme rooms,
so you could assign people into different rooms
so if people wanna talk about different topics,
different themes even in terms
of the energy within a breakout room,
so people who want to go to the bar room
could have that option.
And people who want a more laid back,
say tea or coffee experience can go into that room.
Number four, and I'm a big fan of this,
random coffee dates where everyone's name
goes into a random name generator and gets spat out.
And then you connect virtually
with people that you might otherwise not connect with.
But you can also do this in groups,
a random name generator
where four people are randomly connected to one another,
and they all meet for coffee.
And it's a great way just to mix
and match different people from different departments
from different teams who don't ordinarily
get a chance to spend time with each other.
Number five, schedule some social events.
It could be a breakfast social, a lunch social,
an after work cocktail hour.
You could keep it totally free-form,
where everybody just gathers a just leave it up to everybody
to guide the conversation.
Or you could have a few great questions in reserve
in case the conversation lags,
or to keep the conversation going.
You could make use of the chat function
or the poll function to ask some interesting questions
to get some conversation going, and make it fun.
So just think of some fun trivia questions,
some fun poll questions to engage people in a different way.
And as you experiment with different social events,
use it as an opportunity
to encourage different team members to step up
and take on the role of the host of the social function.
It just gives them a chance
to flex their muscles a little bit.
It's not facilitating because that sounds way too serious,
but if they wanna play the role of host
and guide the conversation and guide the questions,
then that's a great opportunity
that you wanna spread around
to different people on your team.
Number six, virtual lunch and learns are a great opportunity
for people to connect on a social level.
You could just do them really short,
like 10-minute, 15-minute lunch and learn sessions
in terms of the learning part,
and then the rest of the lunch, keep it social.
And again, use this as an opportunity
for different employees to step up and present something.
Maybe it's, doesn't have to be work-related.
The whole point here is to make it a social experience.
So encourage, invite your employees to submit an idea
for something they do in their personal life.
Maybe it's a hobby that they have a passion
that they have outside of work
that they would be willing to share
with the rest of their teammates.
And number seven, lastly, try a little show and tell.
Hey, it worked good when we were in grade one,
so why not use this in a virtual social setting
where everybody has to just bring one object
or a photo that has some special story behind it,
some significant meaning to it
and share with the rest of the team.
It's just one of many, many ways
that you can bring a little bit of structure
to a social event.
There's no end of ideas.
What you have to do is just make sure you're intentional
about providing that virtual water cooler experience
that employees are missing.
So what are you doing in your workplace
to keep people connecting at just a social level?
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