The value of the water cooler conversation (and what to replace it with)

21 years ago, I was an intern in a large bank in Paris. It was my final year of business school and this internship would likely determine where I would start my career in earnest. As with all office spaces, there was a water cooler and a break room complete with a smoking area (this was France after all). More than any formal interview or meeting, it’s in that area that I had conversations that would move my career forward.

My internship was in the marketing department. On my team was a 30-year veteran of the company. Her name was Brigitte. She had worked in every department in the Paris office, knew everyone and, as a result, she was aware about things before they became official.

Brigitte told me about a new opening in Hong Kong, and she gave me the name and number of the person to talk to. She said “He knows me, he was an intern in this team, just like you, so you should have a leg up. Tell him I said you should call him.” I did, promptly. And three months later, I was starting a job in Hong Kong.

Brigitte was also responsible for teaching me about the company’s culture. I learned how things got done through the stories she told me about people who’d previously been in my shoes and how they had dealt with certain situations. She also told me stories about the various leaders that had come through over the years. With all of her experience, she had both positive and negative feedback about the company, but it didn’t seem that leadership was really listening to any of it. Nothing had changed when it came to her more pointed criticism of the company. The leaders didn’t come to our water cooler. And Brigitte wasn’t a manager or in a leadership position. She was a project coordinator.

I thought of this story because recently a client of ours asked the question:

“How can we give new people a sense of who we are in the company if they can’t meet anyone in person in a physical space?”

My client may as well have asked

“How do we replace the water cooler?”

What gets lost when we move to a remote and mostly virtual work environment are the informal ways we have of connecting with colleagues. When we schedule a zoom meeting, we have a very specific agenda in mind, and we stick to those points. This has led many of us to think that working remotely is more efficient than being in a physical office. We’ve cut down on commuting. We’re no longer distracted by other people’s phone conversations near our desk. We don’t run the risk of being called into another meeting in an impromptu way, and we can mostly manage our own time. Of course, working from home has many challenges, such as negotiating the space with roommates, partners, spouses, and children. (I have two children and there’s no school, so there are definitely distractions.)

Whatever the challenges and advantages of working remotely, we’ve lost the chance to connect with colleagues in ways that are not planned. For the many businesses that have kept hiring through the pandemic or are just starting to hire again, they need to think about how to welcome people and transfer cultural knowledge outside of formal meetings or serendipity. It’s hard to start a more personal conversation in a meeting with a set agenda. When we see someone at the water cooler, we usually say hello and ask “How are you?” That simple question is the opportunity for a conversation that doesn’t necessarily relate to work. Many times, people will check in on how their family is doing. People will share what they’ve been working on, what challenges they currently have, or how they succeeded in executing a project. Often, people will share something that’s bothering them, like Brigitte did, or distracting them, positive or negative.

Replacing the water cooler

As human beings, we often tend to start with what’s wrong before we move on, and that serves a purpose. We want someone else to hear us, and we want to feel heard. There’s comfort in that because we are engaging our empathic side, and that leads to more understanding.

Simply put, everyone needs a listener and the water cooler was the perfect place for that.

When we recently ran an online workshop for the leadership institute CORO, we created breakout groups for people to simply say what their obstacles to listening were. We placed people in pairs where they could have a dialogue just between the two of them. The only instruction was to say to each other what was getting in the way of their ability to be present and to listen. We asked them to do this and not interrupt each other. Back in the large group, they shared reflections on the process. Many people mentioned that they had felt isolated since the pandemic started, even though they were in constant contact with their families and places of work. They were missing the human connection that came with being listened to, openly and non-judgmentally, without an agenda.

When we onboard new hires, we intentionally create space for listening even before we begin storytelling. We do so precisely because listening is central to effective communication, to building bonds and connections. The two, listening and storytelling, are inextricably intertwined as has become obvious the more listening situations are absent in our working lives. If I feel like I’m being listened to openly, then I will be inclined to tell stories I wouldn’t have otherwise, and if I listen to a story that triggers my own experience, then I will be encouraged to tell a story of my own as a way of connecting with the person I’m in a dialogue with.

This makes stories one of the most accessible ways we have of transferring knowledge; in particular, they distill the values of an organization so that new hires not only understand them intellectually, but also that they are motivated to live by them.

By formalizing what goes on informally and making storytelling a part of a virtual onboarding strategy, companies preserve the type of exchange that’s at the heart of casual knowledge sharing now less available due to the lack of a physical space.

Those challenges, successes, and personal moments that are shared around the water cooler can be collected, crafted and recorded as stories from current employees and leadership to new hires via video.

When new hires watch and listen to their new colleagues tell specific stories that demonstrate values, culture, job performance, and any strategic message you need to transfer, not only do they gain deep human insight into the workings of the organization, but they can be invited to reflect upon their new job and team and to ask questions that the stories inspired, or to share stories of their own. In fact, because stories are about specific moments, relationships, and team dynamics, they are an ideal way to direct a dialogue that will be more on point than a casual conversation around the water cooler. Yet they retain that informal, live and interactive quality.

Now we’ve come back around to the famed water cooler!

Not only can you replace the water cooler conversations, you can actually turn them into better discussions and sources of fruitful dialogue for your new hires.

So take a moment to mourn the death of the water cooler if you need to, and then celebrate the fact that you can re-create that feeling of empathy, understanding and belonging, by implementing listening and storytelling practices throughout your organization, starting with your new hire onboarding process.