Planned Spontaneity: Connecting With Colleagues (whenever and wherever)

“We want those spontaneous water cooler moments again.”

That’s what an IT director at a large bank told me when I asked him earlier this year why they are going back to the office after the pandemic. It seems that how people interact with each other at work is important enough to invest millions of dollars a year in maintaining office spaces, coffee machines, and (even) the occasional ping pong table.?

Spontaneous connections at work matter. Indeed, my own research shows the biggest pain point of remote work — by a sizable margin —? is missing social interaction with colleagues.? Just check out the results from a question on my annual survey on remote work from 2020 in the image below.?

Back when clocking in at a local office was the default for knowledge workers, spontaneous interaction was guided by the physical office space. Now that remote work has equal or even dominant footing to in-person setups, teams need to rethink how to maintain social connections for their workforce.

Moving forward, the situation won’t get easier with the prevalence of hybrid teams. Though hybrid work settings offer flexibility — something a vast majority of the people say they want — these setups will inevitably result in making it even more difficult to connect with colleagues. How do you give teams freedom to work wherever they want and foster interpersonal relationships at the same time??

Paradoxically, the answer to this hybrid paradox is itself a paradox (or more accurately an oxymoron): planned spontaneity. Rather than leaving the proverbial “watercooler” moments to chance, you must create them intentionally.

The good news? I believe it’s totally possible to have the best of both worlds: the flexibility to work from anywhere and to have personal connections with colleagues. Here’s how I’ve seen it done.??

1. VIRTUAL COMPANY RETREATS

In the last year or so, MURAL put on two company-wide retreats during the pandemic. Both we’re stunning — fun, engaging, and resulting in a ton of personal connections. Check out these summaries:?

• MURAL’s virtual retreat in 2020?
• MURAL’s virtual retreat in 2021

2. TEAM BUILDING EVENTS

Plan ways to build a cohesive team experience, even if participants aren’t all in the same physical locations. For example, we often have “Project Kickoffs” when starting new initiatives to understand the goals, constraints, and timeline. Why not also “kickoff” the team and get to know each other??

For instance, my colleague, Emilia ?str?m, and I recently ran a webinar going over one of MURAL’s templates for building teamwork. In a nutshell, it’s a deliberate moment to focus on the team. Here’s a template to guide the interaction.?

3. DAILY INTERACTIONS

Retreats and team-building events are great, but you should also strive to make play and fun a regular part of your team interactions.?

I like to do regular check-ins and warm-ups. Pick Your Nic is one of my favorites (see more on that in this LinkedIn post), but you can do the same thing with cats, superheroes, and more. Or, invent your own warm-up that gets people to disclose a little about themselves. It will do wonders for your subsequent meetings and workshops. Read more here over at the MURAL blog.?

Or try setting Virtual Watercooler to allow for connections to colleagues asynchronously. Learn more about a virtual watercooler (and grab a template for yours, too!) in this blog post: https://www.mural.co/blog/virtual-office-water-cooler?

4. SCHEDULE FUN TIME TOGETHER

Why not schedule time to have fun? Virtual happy hours and playing games together is totally possible in remote and hybrid settings. Here’s a virtual open mic night with people from various teams at MURAL across time zones and different continents. It works! You can absolutely foster meaningful connections with distributed and hybrid teams, if you just put a little effort and planning into it.

There are many other ways to plan for spontaneity — as teams shift to these novel ways of working, more are being discovered every day. Are there things you do with your team now to plan for spontaneity? I’d love to hear them.