Since we aren’t standing around the water cooler or sharing a lunch room together anymore, what would it look like if everyone in your company had scheduled meetings with randomized employees in order to build connection and culture?
Transcript:
John Lamy: In an organization where creativity and innovation is important, as COVID sets in and we start to use Zoom, how do you have the coffee pot? How do you have the informal gathering at the water cooler, where someone says, “I’m working on XYZ.” “Oh, so is old Bill over there. He’s working on XYZ as well.” You know, that doesn’t necessarily happen in a meeting.
This friend of mine brought that up. Because he works for an organization, interestingly enough, is fairly innovation oriented. And it turned out, that very week I watched a thing from MIT about that very problem. And the best the guy could come up with was to go ahead and schedule zoom meetings that are just without that much structure – like what we’ve got going right now, right here on this very thing.
The contention was that those kinds of situations can go ahead and bring back that informal water cooler thing that really helps with innovation.
Steve Rice: So what would happen if you, azaas ann executive said, “Okay, every day we’re gonna have a randomized meeting between 9:30 and 9:45, and five different people are gonna be in each meeting, and everybody in the company is going to do this. So if you’ve got 500 people, there are going to be 100 five-person meetings that last 15 minutes, randomly selected. So you might actually be talking to the janitor, or the gal in the shipping room, or the guy in the accounting department. And your job is just to say, “Hey, who are you? What’s your name? How are your kids?”