Why encourage informal communication?
- Informal communication channels encourage employees to share ideas, collaborate, and work together more effectively. By fostering a relaxed and open environment, informal communication can break down barriers and hierarchies, allowing individuals to connect on a more personal level. This can lead to enhanced teamwork and better collaboration among colleagues, resulting in improved problem-solving and innovative solutions.
- When people feel comfortable and at ease with one another, it creates a positive work environment, promotes trust, and enhances camaraderie. These relationships can enhance employee satisfaction and engagement, leading to higher productivity and job satisfaction.
- Informal communication allows employees to express their thoughts, concerns, and feedback more freely. When employees feel heard and valued, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated. Informal conversations can also provide insights into employee needs and expectations, enabling organizations to address concerns and implement improvements, ultimately boosting overall employee engagement and satisfaction.
The most ingenious ideas and important conversations most often happen around the water cooler or at lunch.
As a team leader, you have to maintain good relationships in the team in order for it to be as effective as possible. This is especially important in online teams, international companies with different backgrounds and cultures, and remote teams. Here are some tips on how to do it.
Fully Remote
Since you do not have a physical space to get together, we suggest using various online solutions and practices to embrace informality.
1. Mood Tracking
Many remote teams have a daily communication of sorts. You might text your plans to the chat or have a daily standup Zoom meeting. Use a simple questionnaire to track the mood of the team. And leave a space for a short emotional explanation.
E.g.: Alex is stressed today. He has an essential client meeting. He will text his colleagues: Stressed. This client meeting is getting me off.
If you have a large team, you might use tools like Kona to take it to the next level. With this instrument, you’ll be able to track the mood changes of your team and respond more quickly to extreme cases.
2. Scheduled Informal Meetings
It might sound counterintuitive but in a new reality informal communication should be sometimes scripted. We got two ideas for you.
- Schedule a team coffee
Once a week or a month your team might get together with no agenda, no facilitator, and no dress code. Just get your coffee and a sandwich, get to the kitchen, and spend an hour chatting. The conversation is not kicking off? Don’t worry, let the silence be there for a moment, and then be surprised how it will develop after one person will suddenly break it. We’ve been there, trust us, it happens!
- Schedule random coffee meetings
30 minutes with a random person from the company is a nice way to emulate coffeehouse creativity, where people randomly share ideas and feel connected. Since one 2 one communication might be a bit intimidating, you might create a couple of questions to kick off the talk.
You can use Slack integrations like Donut to automate this process for your company. Know more about it and install:
3. Play Sessions, Trivia, and Edutainment
Having a structured activity is always a nice way of getting teammates to know each other. Being taken off the traditional work set up coworkers might express themselves more openly and establish a closer emotional connection.
Nobody says you are a family now, but lots of remote teams got together during the pandemic and operate as a bunch of strangers. That creates tons of problems.
Codenames online for team-building and better understanding of how your teammates’ minds work, what associations do they make among words
Rules:
Skribblio: No Drawing Talent Needed! Fun way to relax and create local memes for the team (which is very important)
Rules: players take turns drawing out a simple word or phrase while others try to guess based on the drawings. Players make guesses in a chat box, which hides correct answers so that everyone can play until the end. The interface also reveals letter hints as time decreases to help players guess.
Requiring no shared screen, simple gameplay, perfect for audio-only Discord hangouts or low-bandwidth video chats.
You might build trivia about teammates or on an unrelated topic yourself using Kahoot. Or outsource it completely using MysteryTrip or similar software.
Deliver training, presentations, meetings and events in-person or on any video conferencing platform. Create a learning game or trivia quiz on any topic, in any language:
Another nice activity is edutainment programs. You might use services like Homa to order ready-made workshops on mindfulness, sports, and storytelling. Or contact us at BEsmart to organize a debate club or PowerPoint night for the team. That way, you will also give your team a chance to know each other better, learning some useful skills in the process.
Hybrid
It still might be difficult to set up interactions while you are on a hybrid team. Though at least you get people talking in the office. And that is half of success. To make it even better you can try introducing those ideas to your team:
1. Mutual Office Days
If you have people coming in some time make sure to use this benefit. Let teams choose the exact dates for themselves but if teammates will be in the office at the same time it will boost productivity even if there will be no scheduled activities.
2. Pay More Attention to Meetings
You can learn facilitation techniques or ask an external consultant to help you set up more engaging and meaningful in-person meetings that will drive your employees to the office out of interest, not necessity.
The most fascinating meetings are usually the ones that are focused on solving a creative task. But a regular brainstorm will probably cheer up nobody. So try using some creative thinking framework to make this session something special.
Put Your Team First
No matter how good your ideas are, it’s always a bad idea to just force them into an application. Focus on what your team is agreeing with, listen carefully to their feedback, and be agile. It’s the only way to affect such a difficult matter as team communication.
