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> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so
by siva7 1y ago
> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk.
This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so such rambling channels often times feel more like another chore and therefore fail because they haven't emerged of a natural need from the team.
- MrGilbert 1y agoAlthough it really depends on the team's maturity to acknowledge that they are missing social interaction in the first place. I'd also argue that "scheduled meetings" doesn’t translate to "water cooler talk" automatically. So even if you'd have regular scheduled meetings, you might still crave for some socializing.
- siva7 1y agoI would hope so that scheduled meetings would not translate to water cooler talk. I want to talk about the agenda and not some smalltalk. People tried crazy things during covid to replicate the water cooler talk through remote tools. If we can have some laughs together about the agenda, that's what i like. People are different i guess.
- MrGilbert 1y agoI usually ask people if they are open to a coffee talk. Just 15 minutes each month. Some people talk about their personal life, others talk about what's on their mind with regards to this and that work project. It‘s interesting how different people are. I‘m fine with any of those topics - I value the interaction more than the content.
- scarface_74 1y agoI’m not anti social by any means. Part of my job has been flying out to talk to customers, the business dinners, helping sells to close deals (I’m more of the post sales architect), etc. There is a bar downstairs where I live in a tourist area where I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there, maybe get a drink or sip on diet soda and just talk to whoever comes down and with the bartender. We had a regional in person get together a day before I went on vacation and the get together was supposed to be an overnight trip. I flew in the morning and flew out back home late that night just so I could attend the social events the day before the meeting. All that and I hate remote “social” events and don’t attend. I loved our team’s quarterly get togethers where we would fly out out to one of our company’s headquarters once a quarter someone in the US. All of us are older (35+) and have lives outside of work. We come to work to make money, not to socialize.
- codethief 1y agoI have worked for remote companies since covid and even though we have daily meetings, a dedicated space for ramblings actually sounds like a cool idea. We usually try to keep our meetings strictly on-topic.
- count 1y agoWe schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team. It helps a LOT. We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.
- stingraycharles 1y agoWe tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work. As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
- jobs_throwaway 1y agogroup discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted
- parpfish 1y agoEven worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings: The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations. But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
- ghaff 1y agoAnd the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video. The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls. It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.
- ruszki 1y agoI’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time. Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.
- goalieca 1y ago> Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, .. And because we spend 30-50% of our day in meetings, some person is always saying "take this offline" or "we'll circle back later".
- jama211 1y agoI wish they said that in my meetings. Instead I sit there for an hour whilst other people argue through minutia that doesn’t concern me.