The history and purpose of water cooler talk
The concept of the water cooler at work began sometime in the 1960s. Employees getting together and having a casual chat goes way back, but it was during this era that workers began meeting up during the day, standing around in the break room and discussing the jokes they’d all heard on “The Tonight Show” the night before.
The essence of water cooler talk is that colleagues come together and forge personal relationships at work. This is a fantastic method for informally sharing ideas, hashing out problems and developing a thriving company culture. So, if half or more of your workers are at home, how can you still get the benefits of easy going chatter?
Benefits of a thriving water cooler culture
The off-the-cuff chatter that took place around the water cooler forged bonds between coworkers who would often develop real friendships and a relationship of mentor-mentee trust that made teams much more effective. New ideas could be casually bounced around, and more than a few innovations came along that might never have happened without it.Apart from the friendships that grew in this environment and the fertile ground for new ideas, it was also a decent way for management to connect with frontline employees to hear their concerns and get crucial feedback about how the company was looking from the ground floor up.
Challenges of an at-home workforce
The workers who generally benefitted the most from casual, in-person contact at the water cooler are also likely to have spent the pandemic years working in isolation at home. Tech workers, copywriters, marketing specialists, HR workers, operations specialists, engineers and others were told to stay home and were unable to just bump into coworkers in the break room.
The virtual office
This is a challenge that has already been largely overcome in the more high-priority areas of remote workplaces, with the rise of hosted workspace apps and SaaS cloud offices. While the pandemic accelerated the progress companies were making toward distributed workforces, Zoom, Google Meet and Slack were already there. These apps facilitate file sharing, structured collaboration on projects and team development within the company structure, even for a workforce that’s scattered all over the place.
What these apps lack, however, is that critical element of informality that the water cooler used to provide. The easy give and take of a chance meetup is a bit harder to foster when every participant has a set of login credentials and most communication is done through advanced file sharing. Thankfully, there are more options than just these to catch up to the virtual water cooler gap.
9 ways to encourage virtual water cooler chat
So what are the best ways to recreate the helpful vibe that the water cooler used to provide? It may be worthwhile to actively seek out virtual alternatives for workers to provide a natural replacement for the physical break room where they used to casually meet up with their coworkers. The same virtual water cooler conversation topics that used to be held in person can still thrive online or at a third location if you get the ball rolling.
Invest in virtual office chat apps
Virtual office chat apps encourage users to keep things informal and personal. Certain apps, such as Discord, already have the fantastic feature of allowing users to work in multiple rooms simultaneously, each dedicated to a different topic. While the main Discord chat room may be strictly a business forum and the second page is for questions about HR and management, you can easily add multiple expansions to host high-level fan discussions, enthusiastic sports conversations and chatter about plans for the weekend. Many employers actually label these virtual spaces as their water coolers.
Encourage off-platform breaks
Water cooler breaks have traditionally been brief and occurred at odd times during the day. The chance nature of these encounters has been a decent stimulant for sudden bursts of creativity. Very few people have the inclination to work straight through a multi-hour workday, so it probably doesn’t hurt to encourage breaks from the office apps and a shift over to more social apps, or even to private emails and phone messaging, if the team is into that.
In-person meetups
As much fun as it can be to sneak breaks on a monitored digital platform, meeting up in real life is still a necessary part of water cooler culture. As the employer, you may not have to do anything here. A lot of the time, people who work long hours together will spontaneously get the idea to meet up for lunch, brunch, a ball game or other non-work occasions. These meetups cost you nothing, boost morale quite a bit and may deliver most or all of the benefits the old break room encounters did and more.
Company-sponsored get-togethers
Just because your employees spend one-third of their waking lives either at the company office or doing the company’s work from home, that doesn’t automatically mean they aren’t willing to invest a bit more time in non work activities. Companies can encourage their own events for employees, assuming that they aren’t already organizing weekend meetups themselves. You may not get many volunteers to stick around for hours after work Monday through Friday, but a company picnic on Saturday or a Sunday afternoon meetup at a local bar and grill is always a popular option.
Start business resource groups
Business resource groups got their start well before the pandemic, but until now, they’ve largely been considered an extracurricular activity that workers did while away from the workplace. These are basically company social clubs, and they can be for almost anything. Your company can sponsor a stamp collecting society, a softball team or a fantasy football league. Whatever it is that your employees find themselves connecting to, the regular schedule of meetups and virtual conferences away from the professional constraints of the office can go a long way toward restoring that golden atmosphere of relaxed water cooler talk among colleagues in good standing.
Gamify the work your teams do
Gamification is one of the more exciting recent developments in teams management. By structuring your teams’ projects as a challenge or by setting up a competitive dynamic in the way that tasks are developed, you can add energy to the virtual office. When rebuilding your water cooler culture for remote and virtual employees, try building incentives and reachable team goals into projects to encourage teamwork and cooperation outside of weekly Zoom meetings.
Reward freelance good deeds
Extracurricular activities can stand in for the old water cooler as far as building togetherness and a sense of purpose. Many businesses schedule charitable or philanthropic activities for their remote workers, such as volunteering at a local food bank or completing a neighborhood cleanup. This can be a great opportunity to bring team members together outside of working hours to get to know each other and develop the easy rapport that the break room used to foster.
Encourage kindness between workers
Workers at a company do things for each other all the time, but how often does one of them get a thank-you note? Small acts of gratitude like this are helpful for building trust and cooperation, and there are several ways to do it. Brief notes of thanks are one way as are small gifts. Team leads can also encourage employees to nominate each other for awards, prize tickets, minor weekly performance bonuses and other little favors that make a huge impact on how your team members treat each other.
Schedule extra time
If employees are going to connect with each other, they need the time to do it. Make a space to grow personal connections between team members, and schedule it. Add an extra 15 minutes for social ventilation before and after your virtual meetings. Schedule a weekly or even daily virtual meeting of 5-10 minutes where participants are welcome to just relax and chat with each other like friends around a water cooler.
