All of these can easily be replaced in digital environments, but you’re correct that not all environments will be conducive to this. Don’t see something you can immediately comment on? You can ask nearly anyone any of the following questions and get a response:
What do you like to do to relax after work?
Do you have any media recommendations for me? I’m looking for new content and curious what you like
What’s something you wished you never had to do at work?
In terms of direct replacements or stand ins, I’d suggest some of the following:
Somewhere for people to showcase what normally might be on their desk or on their person- this could be an internal directory of coworkers which contains some info on each person such as hobbies or pictures of their life and family and hobbies. Or it might be a simple template that you fill out and share with management to encourage others to share. It could also be something you insert into your email signature. Feel free to be creative, humans like to socialize and while some may resist sharing this info, many will be excited to.
Public channels of various sorts, especially random and general style channels for larger team or cross team collaboration are great ways to have conversations that you can ‘drop in’ on. You can also start or end meetings with open discussions about life, prompts, or ice breaker style questions to get to know your teammates and give you conversation starters.
Sending direct messages to see who’s available and wants to talk, creating office hours for people to drop in, or simply letting people know that you’re available regularly and frequently are all ways to open the digital door to conversation.
I don’t think it always has to be a video call, and learning how to listen and invite through multiple mediums of communication is a good skill to tap into. Humans are quite varied which unfortunately means there’s no one size fits all solution here so much as there’s a million doors that you can try to open and hope that at least a few will stick with the people you work with. As an aside a contact management system or notes can also help you to keep track of what people enjoy, the names of important figures in their lives, how they like to communicate, etc.
Yeah, so the generic small talk openers. This is definitely something I personally need to work on, but until then, it’s a rather large barrier to cross for socializing.
As for your other suggestions:
I would think most people are less willing to put effort into this than their desk decorations. What you place on your desk is for yourself to enjoy, and it gives a real window into this person’s life. A showcase as you propose is made for other people. You put things there that you think others would like to see. You’ll get very different things, and it’s harder to do, so fewer people will do it, and those who do won’t put in the same kind of effort as they would if it were for their own personal enjoyment.
We have these on Slack. At the start of the pandemic, we had a lot of these ideas float around on how to encourage better socialization and collaboration in an online setting. Everyone was very excited for them, but they very quickly fizzled out. Random conversations still happen and I’ll hop in on those, but they’re like conversations in a large social media platform. You exchange a few messages with a group of people, then you forget about it and never speak to them again.
That’s also something that was tried at my organization. It similarly had a lot of interest at the start, but very quickly died. It just seems that no one really enjoyed it as much as they thought they would.
I also just realized that a large part of socializing for me is just being physically present in the same space as another person and sharing an experience as much as it is talking. Sharing a cup of coffee with someone in silence at a coffee shop? Very enjoyable and relaxing. Doing the same over a zoom call? Awkward AF.
All of these can easily be replaced in digital environments, but you’re correct that not all environments will be conducive to this. Don’t see something you can immediately comment on? You can ask nearly anyone any of the following questions and get a response:
In terms of direct replacements or stand ins, I’d suggest some of the following:
I don’t think it always has to be a video call, and learning how to listen and invite through multiple mediums of communication is a good skill to tap into. Humans are quite varied which unfortunately means there’s no one size fits all solution here so much as there’s a million doors that you can try to open and hope that at least a few will stick with the people you work with. As an aside a contact management system or notes can also help you to keep track of what people enjoy, the names of important figures in their lives, how they like to communicate, etc.
Yeah, so the generic small talk openers. This is definitely something I personally need to work on, but until then, it’s a rather large barrier to cross for socializing.
As for your other suggestions:
I also just realized that a large part of socializing for me is just being physically present in the same space as another person and sharing an experience as much as it is talking. Sharing a cup of coffee with someone in silence at a coffee shop? Very enjoyable and relaxing. Doing the same over a zoom call? Awkward AF.