If before all this (COVID-19) you worked a normal job in an office, for sure you spent a lot of time there and most of your daily social interactions where with people from the office.
Now that you have been remote for more than a year, do you have forced social interactions as part of your work schedule? to keep you being a team player and keep social cohesion at work? But nobody cares about this and people just go not to look bad, but this interaction are completely pathetic and forced?
I think companies should advice or encourage the people they employ to should find a social space somewhere else, so there is a more natural way to fill the void of social interactions with friends, neighbors or activity specific friends, not work related. Companies will have to evolve to to manage their project as opensource projects are managed. Distributed with async communication, like issues and pull requests or something like that.
I don't know for sure, these are random thoughts.
Top comments (1)
My team has a weekly 30 minutes scheduled hangout just to talk about anything. I guess we are pretty lucky because we have many things in common and enjoy company, so I actually look forward to it every week. We are also free to create spaces to interact. I invited everyone to drink a beer and celebrate my birthday with me (after work) and most of them joined the video call.
Within the whole company, I would say it's harder to spread this kind of social interaction. We have had company-wide events just to play games and meet others, but you can't do that often enough so it feels like hanging out with people in "real life". We also hosted a hackathon recently and got many people from different areas together.
My point on this last one is, maybe you don't need to push for it to be a "social meeting". You can give others something to think about that will motivate their inner social animal.
Besides that, being spontaneous matters. We host spontaneous coffee meetings every day. Just jump into Slack and invite people to join in 20 minutes for coffee. Sometimes it's going to be 2 of you, sometimes 15.