Where’s Your Watercooler?

Watercooler whereabouts – maximize locations of your 'innovation hubs'.

Leadership in 4D – foster trust and belonging by being transparent.

Last week, I participated at Running Remote, a community and conference which gathers prominent leaders, researchers, practitioners and operators in the workplace flexibility/Future-of-Work field.

I share gems below from numerous presentations and conversations. Lean in, take them in, and act. Moving faster, tackling unusual uncertainties, you need flexibility and focus to continually gather and apply insights to avoid attention-diverting and resource-depleting mistakes.

Watercoolers are NOT innovation stations. How could it be logical or sensible to emphasize random interactions around a fixed site water dispenser to stimulate the crucial innovation needed to grow and scale?

Watercoolers have become partial excuses for RTO policies. However, hyperlocal, watercoolers are unlikely to generate extensive office flow and countless idea-sparking random encounters, since MIT professor Thomas Allen’s 1977 data show employees are:

• 4x more likely to talk regularly with someone sitting 6ft versus 60ft away.
• Unlikely ever to speak to coworkers on separate floors or in separate buildings.

Watercoolers’ usefulness is highly constrained by their physical location—which has very limited radius—since work is distributed across multiple offices and other locations. Harvard Business School professor, ​Prithwiraj Choudhury​ (Raj), explained the exponential negative effects of the ‘Allen curve’ above.

These results contrast with Raj’s own ​virtual watercooler study​ in which they ‘engineered serendipity’ by randomly assigning half-hour mandatory conversations between very senior executives and summer interns working remotely. The interns’ performance ratings were positively impacted.

​Lauren DeYoung​, Workplace Futurist at ​Allstate​, mentioned the benefits of using virtual watercooler apps which are digital spaces or platforms where distributed employees can gather informally. These applications foster casual conversations, relationship building, and unplanned collaboration.

Innovation issues: How are you currently cultivating serendipitous interactions between people working across distant cubicles, different floors, or distributed nationally or internationally? In physical and virtual space, where can you foster game-changing ideas?

Actions to take:

• Be intentional about influencing serendipity and enhancing multimodal collaboration.
• Test virtual watercooler apps such as Alfy Matching, Donut, and CultureBot.
• Make managers accountable and reward relevant ways to engineer serendipity.

Leaders must bring more depth and dimension: more human centricity, more emotional understanding. Deeper, trusting relationships and more empathetic sensibility are imperative now to keep your team and workforce grounded, engaged, motivated, performing, and healthy.

Trust is the foundation of strong cultures, teams, and results. Employees in high-trust workplaces are 76% more engaged and experience 74% less stress and 40% less burnout [​The Neuroscience of Trust​ in HBR by ​Paul Zak​]. Belonging creates safe space for people to speak up, take risks, and innovate. You’re busy driving your business forward, how can you build trust and belonging (fast)?

Transparency builds trust and belonging.

Openly sharing information about operations, decisions, and goals-directly fosters trust between management and employees and a sense of belonging. When employees feel informed and included, they are more likely to believe in company leaders’ integrity and intentions, which improves outcomes.

Trust, transparency, and belonging are essential to scale your business:

• 86% of workers and 74% of leaders surveyed said an increasing focus on trust and transparency in the relationship between employees and employers is “very” or “critically important”.
• This emphasis was projected to have greatest impact on an organization’s success 2024-2027 [Deloitte, ​Global Human Capital Trends 2024​].
• Experiencing organizational transparency was a top response from employees asked about workplace culture and what would make them feel like they belong within their workplace [​LinkedIn​].

Issues to uncover: How trusted are your senior leaders? Do most employees have trusting relationships with their managers? How much information do executives and managers share with their teams? How strong is teams’ sense of belonging at your company?

Actions to take: ​Darren Murph​, responsible for Cloud HQ Experience at ​Zillow​, shared revelations about the reactions of teams who had created team agreements to document their working practices and also shared these agreements with other teams. Greater information exchange and openness gave teams more sense of connection and belonging. Darren stressed trust in technology/tools too:

• Create team agreements to clarify roles and improve mutual reliability within each team.
• Share these agreements across teams to exchange understanding and learnings.
• Ensure technologies used are integrated and dependable so employees can do their best work.

SOLVE your priority issues: I am thrilled to announce the launch of select weekly one-on-one sessions you can schedule with me to talk through your targeted questions and develop relevant solutions. I can also help you adapt company leadership styles to meet modern operational and workforce needs. ​FIND OUT more and pick a session time​ that works for you.

See you next week for more practical insights and timely tips!

Sophie