Why you need virtual watercooler for your startup?
In the simplest of words an organisation is an organised group of people who come together with a particular purpose. This simple fabric has been put to test by the pandemic. The sudden forced remote working has created stress and exposed the fault lines of the organisation. The biggest threat is to the culture of the organisation.
Office not just served as a place for work it also was a social place where people came together, bonded together, exchanged their world views and had good time together. It is not a coincidence that for most of us 50% of our friends are people who we have worked with. Many of us might have had many life changing relationships with people we have met at work. I for one have Srivatsan (Vatsan) Padmanabhan as my cofounder at GoFloaters. Both Vatsan and self started our professional lives together at Infosys and have continued on to work together and play together for years. These social interactions that would happen at the “watercoolers” of an organisation were suddenly taken away from us. These metaphorical places in our offices where individuals would have informal and non-work related interactions served a deep purpose than just being ice-breakers and a gossip exchange.
“Watercooler” and organisation culture
We are all born storytellers & are drawn to stories automatically. Any culture or faith in the world is passed down through generations through a large collection of stories that embody the virtues and values of the culture or faith. These stories have stood the test of time inspite of the fact that many of them have just been transmitted through word-of-mouth.
Similarly an organisation culture is also embodied by a collection of stories that is unique to the organisation. The stories encapsulate what the organisation stands for, what are the non-compromisable values of the company are, what the acceptable behaviours are, what are not acceptable behaviours and so on.
We have all heard stories on what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did in their garage to challenge the status-quo. We have heard stories of how Apple goes the extra mile to design their products and provide the best possible experience to its customers. Such stories is what makes Apple the Apple that we all have come to know so much about even though we might not work there. These stories is what enthuses someone to apply for a position at Apple. These stories is what keeps people working for the company.
What would happen if some evil force somehow erased such stories from all of our memories? Would we still love the company? Would we still be able to relate to the company?
Within an organisation these stories get transmitted through “watercooler” interactions. When having a coffee with a team member or having lunch together with your team, these stories get exchanged. These stories extoll the culture of an organisation and “watercoolers” are the synapses through which these stories get exchanged across the organisation. A new employee who gets inducted into the team gets to learn about the organisation more from such informal conversations than the talks by HR or their hiring manager.
“Watercooler” helps with other things too
While preserving the culture is the most important service that watercooler interactions do, they also add value to the organisation in many other ways.
- Stress busters : This is the most logical service that watercooler interactions provide us with. When we are stressed at work or finding it hard to crack an issue, we take a break and go for coffee with a colleague. After about 15 mins of talk with the colleague when we come back to our desk we somehow auto-magically feel that we have some new ideas and feel recharged. Agreed that 50% of this new energy is from the coffee. The rest 50% is from the watercooler interaction with our colleague that helped us teleport away from our stress.
- Glue — Team bonding : Team is defined by a few as “Together Everyone Achieves More”. How does one achieve this togetherness? It does not magically happen when you put strangers in a room for 8 hours. Seldom do you bond with someone who has travelled with you in a trans-atlantic flight for over 8 hours. You start bonding when you exchange your stories. If stories have the power to bring people together then, watercooler is the platform that helps the exchange of stories.
- Lubricants — Resolve conflicts : You have an argument with a colleague at a meeting. You fight tooth-and-nail to defend your view and so does your colleague. Eventually you both agree to disagree and the meeting ends without a conclusion. Yet, when you both step out together for lunch and discuss the same issue over lunch you are able to somehow resolve the conflict. When in a formal setting we all add some invisible protective gear around us. At the same time when having an informal conversation our guards are dropped and we are more open to listen.
While watercoolers in an office setting is most often a physical place and a physical face-to-face interaction it does not always have to be. At Cognizant ,where I worked for more than a decade, our internal blogging platform “ChannelOne” served as a virtual watercooler. Stories about people who work there, the organisation and the senior management’s style of working all got exchanged. Many of use Slack or an equivalent for intra-company communications. You could set up virtual watercoolers on these platforms as well.
As we all set ourselves to embrace the new way of working in either a hybrid or a remote first model, watercooler interactions will take a hit. It is for the leaders and founders of startups to take a conscious effort to induce other ways in which the tension in the company can be diffused and the culture be preserved. As you induct new team members, you need to take conscious effort to make the new member part of the team. You need to ensure that they understand the culture of the organisation. The effort that you put in here early on will pay you high dividends in the long run.
Shyam Sundar is a Fulbright Scholar and an accomplished technologist. He is a champion of work from anywhere and remote working. is the Founder and CEO of GoFloaters.
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