Boosting Your Culture with Coffee

With so many teams moving to remote work, hosting virtual meetings has become the norm. We've all see the screen captures of the ubiquitous Zoom meeting rooms with fun backgrounds, the FaceTime chats, and the digital townhalls that have been happening the last few weeks.

It's been great to see so many teams rally so quickly to try to maintain some level of normal communication with each other.

But one of the things that could easily get lost is all of the other small, normal, and often unnoticed ways we connect in the office. We pass people in the kitchen. We lean over to chat with a colleague from another team. We chat in the elevator. We small talk while washing our hands in the bathroom.

In fact, when I've helped with designing office spaces we specifically aimed to create "bumper" spaces where we people would be forced to interact with each other. We created inviting community spaces to encourage casual meetings and conversations (shout out to Marissa Cramer for the stellar job she did on the ChowNow office).

It's not that people are inherently anti-social -- the opposite is true. It's that we need easy opportunities to connect -- especially at work which is a space that can be loaded with unintended social norms, status issues, and insecurities.

So what happens to your team if the only interaction they have at work is with people who work directly with them on a team or on a project? What happens to collaboration, silo-breaking, community, innovation (which often comes from interactions outside of your normal environment), and ultimately the culture? Without attention to this during this work-for-home period, we are going to one day stroll back to our offices really disconnected.

It got me thinking about a program that the People + Culture team at ChowNow sponsored called CoffeeNow which I later wrote about in my book, Company Culture for Dummies (chapter 12, page 227 if you're following along).

The goal of the program was to randomly match people up for coffee who likely rarely worked together on teams or projects. Each month people could opt-in, get matched, and then a couple of gentle reminders to meet for coffee. They would share selfies of their in-person or digital coffee meetups in a Slack channel and then be entered for a drawing each month.

It's a fun simple way to help remote teams stay connected beyond their specific role, team, and projects.

Here is an excerpt from the book in case you want to try the get one going:

1. Create a way for people to opt in. A simple survey where they choose “yes” or “no” each month is an easy way to start. There is also a simple program for Slack called Donut that can do this for you.
2. Create a one-page explanation of the program. Be sure to include the goals (get to know each other better and increase connection), the frequency (monthly is a good start), and guidelines (suggest a length of time, ways to connect).
3. Enroll a few people to help you organize it. Someone can make the matches. Someone else can send out the emails/messages to connect matches.
4. Design some suggested questions to help them get started. These can range from ice-breaker type questions to “what are you working on” type questions. Ask your team to help contribute ideas.

Would love to hear about the interesting ways you are keeping a focus on culture, community, and connection in your organization right now.