Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2022 - 45

With hybrid work here to stay, creating these
small moments of humanity is worth the effort.
3
BUILD YOUR SKILLS
Communicating empathy, understanding
and positive regard is easy when
you are speaking to someone, but do
you know how to do that in writing?
Communicating with warmth through
the written word is a different skill
from the formal business writing
many of us are comfortable with.
For your watercooler chats, you may
need to develop a different lexicon.
GIFs, emojis and memes are all
great informal ways to communicate
without the spoken word, but can be
shunned by more formal businesses.
Yet the whole point of the watercooler
is that it is informal, casual and fun,
so create a space where you can use
different types of expression, rather
than just words.
This goes for the use of video as well.
Just because your team is remote,
employees shouldn't have to spend
all day in
front of their screens in
back-to-back meetings. Create a
walking catchup with different people,
where you both get to leave the
screens behind and get out into the
fresh air. We think differently when
we are in motion, so moving while
chatting can open whole new ways of
conversing together.
4
CREATE NOVELTY
AND PLAY
Novelty creates joy from the unexpected
and can enhance memory. Chances
are that the things you remember best
are the things that took you a little by
surprise. How can you create novelty
for yourself and your team? We often
think of it when we are including
icebreakers for meetings or training
sessions, but how do we transfer this
to the other mediums we are now
working in? How do we create novelty
in an asynchronous environment? One
way is to have dedicated channels for
social chats, where people can post
what they are watching, reading or
doing outside of work.
There is also a world of interesting online
games out there to choose from. For
example, you could invite your team to
do a puzzle a month together, you can
set it up online and people can drop in
and do it at different times - and if they
happen to drop in at the same time, it's a
perfect watercooler moment.
5
STRATEGICALLY CONNECT
ACROSS TEAMS
When we were all together on-site,
collaboration outside of our immediate
team was often facilitated by the
rhythms of the workday. You bump into
someone from a different department
as you walk down the hallway or in
line at the café. You politely ask what
they are working on and suddenly you
are making connections to the work
you are doing and coming up with a
whole new perspective. These small
sparks of interaction can have big
impacts on innovation, connectivity
and alignment across an organization,
so it is important that we deliberately
cultivate them in the hybrid world.
This might be through real-time
interactions like inviting different
people to join your team for an informal
chat or lunch, or it might be through
one of your other selected mediums.
Collaboration platforms sometimes
TRAINING INDUSTRY MAGAZINE - SUMMER 2022 I WWW.TRAININGINDUSTRY.COM/MAGAZINE
have add-ons that connect different
people from across the organization
together for a short coffee chat. They
can help randomize the interactions,
but you could also do this by running
an employee lottery where people opt
in to be paired up for a virtual coffee.
We often test our
riskiest and more
novel ideas at the
watercooler.
In-person connection is still important
from time to time but building up your
virtual watercooler moments can help
to foster connectivity, engagement
and belonging. It is an important part
of ensuring that we continue to see
each other as complex, rich, interesting
three-dimensional beings, and not twodimensional
caricatures. Like anything,
we need to keep learning, ideating and
improving. But with hybrid work here to
stay, creating these small moments of
humanity is worth the effort.
Natalie Richardson partners closely
with businesses to navigate complexity
and disruption, ensuring organizations
and the communities they serve thrive.
She believes in the ability of business
to create sustainable value not just
for today, but for generations to come.
She supports this through evidencebased
approaches from psychology
and behavioral science in her role
as head of client delivery at Inkling.
Email Natalie.
| 45
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