If you’re like me, you’ve probably been working home for some time now. Some of you may even be heading back to work. For those who are permanently at home, however, will need to figure out how to create a sense of community in the workplace. This is how to create a virtual water cooler to keep up your relationships at work.
A few weeks back, I was in a team meeting and a co-worker of mine asked our managers for suggestions on how to keep the open lines of communication going being virtual.
Her specific example was that she used to just pop in by people to ask them questions on how something in excel worked or try to bounce ideas off of others on how to improve something. Now, being at home, she’s more likely to struggle with it herself and not ask others.
Sometimes, she can figure it out, but it will take longer, thus being less efficient. Other times when a change isn’t a huge priority, she’ll just leave it go. She wanted to know how to keep that sort of interaction alive while working from home.
The answer we were given was to just, simply ask. Sure, it sounds easy enough. But, for some reason, doesn’t happen as naturally as it would while in the office.
I could tell she wasn’t pleased with the answer and neither was I. I set out to do some research on how to create a virtual water cooler to keep those sorts of interactions alive in a work-from-home environment.
Schedule Team Breaks
If you don’t currently have team breaks scheduled, I’d suggest doing so now. It doesn’t have to be super often, maybe just once a month or every other week.
Make the breaks just a short 15 minutes with members of your team or some co-workers you enjoy working with the most. You can use this time to ask questions you’ve been wanting to bounce off of others.
Otherwise, you can just use the time to catch up on how people are doing. Sometimes it is nice to just chat about whatever might be happening in people’s lives or around the areas you are all living in.
Basically, it’s just a great way to keep in touch with your co-workers.
One of the managers on my floor did this pretty early on. She was hesitant to do so, not knowing if management would approve of us all using 15 minutes to chat.
Personally, I have found them super helpful. They help break up the monotony of working from home and combat the isolation that I can sometimes feel when spending most of the day alone.
Virtual Events
Another way to stay in touch with co-workers is by scheduling virtual events with them. These can be either during work hours or after work, depending on your workplace standards.
A simple example of this would be a short happy hour at the end of a day where co-workers can sign on and chat about non-work items while enjoying a beverage.
You could also start virtual clubs. I know my company has some golf leagues and choir that take place outside of work. You could do something similar to this but in a virtual format.
An easy example of something like that would be a book club where you pick a book and meet with some sort of frequency to talk about the book.
Another option would be to host virtual team-building events. If you have zoom, you could use the breakout group function to split people into teams to have them work on solving a puzzle or brainstorm ideas on how to help improve something at work.
Again, this is a great way to get in some face time with co-workers and create a sense of community in the workplace.
Collaboration Spaces
Since you can’t meet up in real conference rooms or stop by someone’s cube to work on something, collaboration spaces help significantly in a virtual world.
There are a couple of ways to do this. One would be to have a discussion forum that all employees can use and are encouraged to use. This would include a space to ask others within the department or company questions and where you could get helpful responses back.
You could also create a space for sharing resources where group members should share helpful tips on things they have learned about a process or system that everyone would find useful.
Another way to do this would be with a video meeting. Using Microsoft Teams or Slack, you could set up a virtual break room. This would be a video channel that could be left open all day. People could then enter and leave at their leisure, almost like a real-life break room.
When in there, you could ask a specific question you had or simply chat to a co-worker.
Host Video Meetings
This one is very simple. Instead of just having conference calls, you could have everyone turn on their camera. I know people have been talking about Zoom fatigue, so it depends on your company.
At my company, we never use our cameras even though almost everyone has them on their laptops. There is a healthy balance that can be met between only conference call meetings and having a few meetings using video.
I find that during video meetings I am more engaged and pay more attention to the meeting. On conference calls, I am far more likely to multi-task and try to get something else done. This means that I am not getting the most benefit possible out of the meeting at hand because I’ll miss important information.
Continue Celebrating
I don’t know about you, but my company used to have fairly frequent “celebrations”. Whether it be for a wedding, baby shower, or retirement party we had our fair share of get-togethers. Especially during Packer season, we’d host a fair number of “tailgates” in the form of pot lucks.
Granted, you wouldn’t always stay in the room to eat for the tailgates, but you’d still chat to other people while picking out your food. I found them as general morale boosters.
That is a piece of culture I find to be highly missing these days. We have had several retirements since the pandemic and zero retirement parties. It’s a shame that these people don’t get to have their careers celebrated and a joyful sendoff into retirement.
Continue having these celebrations. It definitely won’t be the same as it used to, but you could still get a group of people into a video meeting to celebrate.
You could have the gifts send to their home ahead of time and then celebrate watching them open their gifts. The company could send a delivery of pizza or cupcakes to the employee’s homes who are attending.
If you’re really spread out, don’t worry about that. Give the employee’s an allowance to have their lunch delivered to their home for the day.
This could be something that could really help the employees still feel part of a team while also helping them feel appreciated.
Virtual Lunches
Set up a recurring meeting to have virtual lunch with some of your work friends. Do it monthly, or every other month, as your schedules allow.
You can eat lunch with one other and catch up on non-work things. If you prefer not to eat during your lunches because it feels super awkward (pointing to myself on this one), that is okay too. The real point is to keep the relationships alive and well.
During our lunches, we’ll periodically give little tours of parts of our house. For example, around Christmas time, we each took turns showing off our trees to another.
Another time, we were all in the kitchen making our lunches and talking, so we got little kitchen tours and got to see how messy each of our kitchens was.
Host Themed Events
Hosting themed events is a great way to bring a little whimsy to your meetings. For this one, I’d recommend keeping it department-specific, unless upper management is totally comfortable with the idea.
If you have a specific large department meeting or just a few meetings with a similar group of people throughout the day, this one could be a fun way to raise spirits and have some fun.
Ideas for a themed event would be to have wacky hair day, funky hat day, or best Bahama shirt day. Just a little something to get everyone acting goofy and raise team spirits.
Encourage Small Talk
When everyone is first logging on to a meeting, make a point of talking about something non-work related with those joining the call. That way people can still catch up a little bit with others on non-work topics to feel a little more connected.
Alternatively, you could do this at the end of the meeting. Be flexible with it. If people are too busy to stay, they don’t have to.
For those wanting a little additional human interaction, offering the ability to hang out for a few minutes after a meeting would build that sense of community. This is an even more enticing option if a meeting ended before its scheduled time because everyone already had their time planned to be in the meeting.
Random Pairings
Having random pairings would take a bit more work than some of the other options. Randomly pair a few employees within the department (or company, if you can get management on board) and schedule them in a “coffee” break.
This can help employees continue to get to know new people throughout the organization. Plus, they might learn something in the process.
Another benefit of this one is employee development. Employees could learn a little bit about other roles or areas of the company they might be interested in moving to eventually.
Show & Tell
Show & tell will bring your right back to kindergarten. For this one, you could schedule one meeting a month with your employees and have them show off something within their house.
There are a few different options here. You could have the focus on one employee per meeting. Alternatively, you could have each employee share a little something.
An example of a topic for show & tell could be having everyone show off their workspace and share tips on how to make it a comfortable place to work. You could stretch a little further and have employees show their favorite piece of décor in their homes or something they love about their landscaping.
Around the holidays, each employee could show off their holiday decorations.
Music Subscriptions
Having a company-wide music subscription for employees to use could be kind of fun as well. If your company is very budget-focused, this one may not be an option, although employees could still share music ideas with each other.
With music subscriptions, the idea is to have employees build playlists and share them with co-workers. They could put together their favorite compilation of songs that motivate them to share with others.
This could be a fun way for employees to open up discussion on something partially related to work, but fun at the same time.
Create Your Virtual Water Cooler
If you’ve been struggling to reach out to others since working from home has started, there is no better time than now to change that pattern.
Pick one of the above items to test out around your workplace and see how it works. Hopefully, your workplace culture will allow some of them to be implemented.
If you know of others wanting to create more of a collaborative environment at work, please share this article on how to create a virtual water cooler with them. We’d like to help out as many people as possible, so we always appreciate spreading the wealth of information.
If you have additional ideas on how to create a virtual water cooler, please feel free to share them below.
Looking for more tips on working from home? Check out this blog article for some pointers!
