Water cooler chat is a phenomenon of the in-person workplace, but that doesn’t mean the it’s lost in an age of more common remote work!
Water cooler talk occurs when two or more people in an office coincidentally meet around the water cooler and have a conversation. Though many offices have a water cooler, the same phenomenon occurs at the snack bar, the coffee machine, or the bathroom mirror. Any place that employees can run into each other can be a place for watercooler conversations.
In remote workplaces and distributed teams, there is no office cooler coworkers can unintentionally gather at, but team leaders can still create spaces that emulate it—like a digital water cooler.
Team Bonding Over a Water Cooler Meeting
The reason creating a virtual water cooler space is so important is because the in-person phenomenon allows for team bonding to occur casually and naturally.
While water cooler topics range in their scope and seriousness, the cooler acts as a place for team members to chat about their weekends, tell a funny story about their pets, or just catch up on progress on their latest project.
Small talk in the break room helps coworkers bond. Once people have bonded more with their coworkers, it will be easier to reach out with problems, updates, and questions about work.
Consistent communication helps make a team more successful. Casual conversation at the cooler helps consistent communication come more naturally.
What Is a Virtual Watercooler?
Many in-person offices just have a water cooler or a similar space. For fully remote offices, though, the team water cooler space will need to be intentionally created.
Just as the in-person water cooler can take multiple forms, so can the virtual watercooler. Simply, there needs to be a space that facilitates remote employee engagement in a casual, but intentional way. Here are a few virtual water cooler ideas.
How to Inspire a Virtual Water Cooler Chat
A good place to start is by creating channels on the platform your company uses for organizational communication (eg. Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc) to act as a digital watercooler. Here, employees can engage in virtual water cooler conversation topics like funny stories, life updates, photos of their pets, and more. You can even spark the conversation by sharing virtual water cooler questions like, “Who all has seen Glass Onion? I finally watched it over the weekend. What did you think?”
Make plans to include virtual employee engagement activities, like scheduling an afternoon tea time or Friday happy hour. These breaks from the workday allow employees to relax with each other and have casual conversation, just like a water cooler moment. You could even expand these break times into longer, intentional co-working calls, where people can hop on a call and work together like they would in the office.
Once you’ve created spaces for casual team bonding, you can think beyond bonding to building a better team culture. First though, even remote employees need a space for virtual talk… just like the water cooler used to foster!
TourGuide Games offers collaborative storytelling games strategically planned to foster and grow your team’s culture. Our sessions are completely unique and can be personalized for your team. Book now or schedule a demo today.
