Maintaining Social Connections in a Virtual, Hybrid Workplace
Maintaining social connections in a virtual, hybrid workplace has never been more important, especially considering a survey that found that 89% of employees feel isolated from the rest of their team when they work from home!
We know social connections are fundamentally important when it comes to building trust at work, improving collaboration, improving morale and maintaining a sense of belonging.
Social connections boost creativity, innovation and productivity. Here are 7 ways to maintain social connections at work.
Seven Ways to Maintain Social Connections in a Virtual, Hybrid Workplace
89% of employees who work remotely say they feel isolated from the rest of their team. People are missing those casual social conversations that they get at work; those hallway conversations. In fact, a university of Western Ontario study found that those water cooler conversations, even though they have nothing to do with work, actually contribute to greater productivity in the workplace.
Those casual conversations are essential when it comes to building greater collaboration in the workplace, in terms of building trust at work, and in terms of breaking down those dreaded silos where people work alone with that bunker mentality.
So, here are a few ways you can be more intentional about creating some opportunities for your virtual remote employees to connect socially.
#1. Build some pre-meeting time into your agenda for people who want to just make it optional for people who want to come on early, say 15 minutes before your official meeting.
We used to do that in meeting rooms where people would come in and gather early. We don’t have that anymore. So, set aside a little time before your official meeting starts for people who want to come in and have that little bit of a social exchange.
#2. Build social time into your agenda. Set aside the first 10 minutes of your meeting agenda for just social time, or if you have a really long meeting, have a network break in the middle of your meeting or allow participants to hangout after the official meeting is over. And again, you can make it optional where those people who want to hang on for another 10, 15, 20 minutes to chat and catch up with their coworkers, have the opportunity to do so.
#3. If your platform allows it, make use of the breakout rooms that are there for a reason to help you have much richer conversations, more meaningful conversations. We know from research that even when the meeting size is more than just six people, introverts or shy people tend to say less. They tend to keep to themselves more. So this is an opportunity for everyone to feel a little more comfortable. When you put them into breakout rooms, you could just use the random feature, so everybody gets randomly put into a breakout room of four people so they can have a more intimate social conversation. You can leave it completely unstructured or you could suggest a few questions to get the conversation going, or you can even have some theme rooms and you could assign people into different rooms based on their interests.
So if people want to talk about different topics or different themes you can create those rooms. You can even create rooms with different vibes. So people who want to go to “the bar” have that option, and people who want a more laid back conversation can go to the “team room”
#4. I’m a big fan of this: Random coffee dates where everyone’s name goes into a random name generator and gets spat out, and then you connect virtually with people that you might otherwise not normally connect with. You can also do this in groups, where four people are randomly connected to one another and they all meet for coffee. And it’s a great way to mix and match different people from different departments, from different teams, who don’t ordinarily get a chance to spend time with each other.
#5. Schedule some social events. It could be a breakfast social, a lunch social, or an after-work cocktail hour. You could keep it totally free form where everybody just gathers leave it up to everybody to guide the conversation. Or you can have a few great questions in reserve in case the conversation lags. Or to keep the conversation going, you could make use of the chat function or the poll function to ask some interesting questions – just think of some fun trivia questions, some fun poll questions to engage people in a different way.
And as you experiment with different social events, use it as an opportunity to encourage different team members to step up and take on the role of the host of the social function. It gives them a chance to flex their leadership muscles a little. It’s not “facilitating” because that sounds WAY too serious, but if they want to play the role of host and guide the conversation, welcome everyone and guide the questions, then that’s a great opportunity that you want to spread around to different people on your team.
#6. Virtual lunch and learns are a great opportunity for people to connect on a social level. You could just do them really short, 10 minutes or 15 minutes in terms of the learning part and then the rest of the time is spent having lunch and socializing. Again, use this as an opportunity for different employees to step up and present something. It doesn’t have to be work-related. The whole point here is to make it a social experience. So encourage your employees to submit an idea for something they do in their personal life. Maybe it’s a hobby that they have a passion for outside of work that they would be willing to share with the rest of their teammates.
#7. Lastly, try a little show and tell! (Hey, it worked good when we were in grade one.) Have everybody bring one object or a photo that has some special story behind it, some significant meaning to it, and ask them to share it with the rest of the team. It’s just one of many, many ways that you can bring a little bit of structure to a social event.
There’s no end of ideas. What you have to do is make sure you’re intentional about providing that virtual water cooler experience that employees are missing.
So what are you doing in your workplace to keep people connecting at just a social level, drop a comment in the comment box below!
Michael Kerr, March 2021. Michael Kerr is a Hall of Fame business speaker who speaks on inspiring workplace cultures. He is the author of 8 books, including The Humor Advantage and The Jerk-Free Workplace.
