The Death of the Watercooler and its impact on Business Life

The office watercooler is a simple symbol of the office gossip spot. A place where colleagues would meet incidentally and relate to one-another about anything and often nothing. Famous TV shows like “The Office” used it as the setting for numerous scenes because, well, it made sense. It was a real location in many offices where informal interaction could take place.

And the watercooler could take other forms. Smoking spots (presumably vaping areas these days) and kitchens, breakout rooms, hallways and stairwells, maybe the elevators. It was the process of popping by a colleague’s desk casually on the way past.

If there is one thing that, currently, technology cannot effectively replace for many organisations, it is these moments.

But these moments aren’t work related anyway right? They carry no direct impact on an organisation’s effectiveness?

Wrong.

Lets take learning and development as an example. Although most immediately associated with training rooms (now virtual) and coaching sessions (now virtual), these formal learning environments only make up a very small percentage of employee learning in the workplace. Studies have shown that this might only amount to around 4% of a worker’s actual learning experience across any given year. 96% of the knowledge, skills, and behaviours that would be learnt would happen in an informal capacity (De Grip 2015, Maastricht University2015).

In other words, from doing, observing, and reviewing their work with their colleagues, away from the classroom. This 96% would include overhearing phrases and approaches used by more senior members of staff, or hearing about specific experiences being discussed in a “watercooler” moment that they might not even be part of. This 96% was the ripple of applause when a leader congratulated a front-line worker for a job well done. Or the moment of walking over to a peer and complaining about a specific experience or customer, only to then discuss a better approach for next time.

Very little, if any, of this is currently possible in many remote working organisations at this time.

What happens to that 96% now?

And then there is company culture. Often mistaken for the “fun” elements of a business, or exclusively associated to “wellbeing” – culture is a far more complicated asset to the most sophisticated businesses. Culture is the people of an organisation, and the way that those people interact in order to put processes into place. It is the way that an organisation celebrates success, relates behaviours to values, challenges the non-believers, and supports its future leaders.

But now, where colleagues are at best taking up a few inches squared on each other's monitor, often staggering under the weight of insufficient Wi-Fi stability, how does an organisation look around and assess the people and processes that make its identity more than just words on a wall somewhere? How does an organisation celebrate success in a manner that doesn’t become contrived (and therefor damaging to its efforts to create a genuine culture), and how does an organisation spot and nurture it’s future leaders in an environment where it is so much harder to identify those valuable leadership skills?

At this time, in reality, many organisations are at risk of falling back into archaic methods for identifying their future leaders. Whose stats look the best? Who is the loudest?

But these methods are damaging, they don’t consider behaviours, values, or true leadership qualities. They give opportunity to cheats and liars, and since their personalities and methods won’t be so easily observed, these damaging traits might not be noticed.

In time, those words on the wall, on the website, under the headers of “values” and “visions” become just that.

Words.

So maybe we abandon the concept of company culture? Maybe that would be easier, right? Abandon something that is readily associated with some of the business success giants of the last ten years? Apple. Amazon. Google. To name a few that you might have heard of.

That would seem very unwise.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stolen many things from the professional world, and though many organisations are adapting and turning the tide with wellbeing initiatives, new technology, and new ways of working, there remains in my mind an unresolved, and easily underestimated question that I feel needs to be considered carefully as we move into 2021.

How does an organisation recreate those watercooler moments? How does culture and informal learning thrive, in a world where informally catching up with someone is now a pre-arranged virtual meeting?

The longer that the pandemic keeps us indoors and isolated from one-another, and the longer organisations don’t consider these moments and how they are recreated in a remote world, the more that these subtle moments that are so core to organisation success will just die away.