1. Coffee chats help new employees feel included and comfortable while settling into their new environment
We've all been there. You're new to a company, don't know anyone, and are expected to immediately start making magic happen -- and it's not easy. Coffee chats are a casual way to make the environment more inviting for new hires by giving them an easy way to initiate conversations with their new colleagues. Creating a coffee chat program in your workplace is really easy!
A lot of companies don't do this well, and it’s easy to lose employees if you don't make an effort to create an inviting environment. Matching people for 1-1 meetings provide new hires an opportunity to get over the hump of reaching out to people in their organization - especially when most people are working from home! It may sound like a silly idea, but they’re incredibly effective.
“In times of the pandemic, CoffeePals is the perfect tool to keep regular contact with all colleagues. You wouldn't have taken the time without this tool. ”- Markus Haas, Managing Director of fonial GmbH
When your employees feel at home, they’re much more likely to stay for the long haul. By having these small-but-impactful interactions every so often, your new employees will feel more connected and invested in your company even before they get to work in their new roles.
2. Create a culture where people care about the success of others and enjoy connecting with them
What’s the secret to creating great company culture? Having more fun at work, or so I’ve been told. The easiest way to do this is to throw a pizza party, but with a global pandemic, social gatherings are pretty much non-existent. Instead, get everyone excited by matching them together randomly for introduction. These, of course, greatly benefit individuals, their work relationships, and the atmosphere of a company. A number of empirical studies show that a workplace with better social connections provides plenty of unexpected benefits. “people get sick less often, recover twice as fast from surgery, experience less depression, learn faster and remember longer, tolerate pain and discomfort better, display more mental acuity, and perform better on the job” - Harvard Business Review.
Many people find it difficult to network or ask for help from others during the pandemic. This can be extremely challenging when a company's culture is lacking camaraderie. By connecting one another on a regular cadence, employees' networks increase and, in turn, create more opportunities for collaboration in your organization. As more employees connect over these brief casual meetings, the company culture will begin to shift from an individual success mindset to a team success mindset.
3. Maintaining open lines of communication is important in a company's development
One-on-ones with people in your organization have the power to boost your professional relationships and create better work environments. Simply put, they provide an opportunity for employees to openly share their experience with someone they don't know in an informal setting. This can lead to more team collaboration, fewer barriers of communication, and more productivity for the company as a whole because employees are more engaged. There are real benefits to open lines of communication. These include:
- Eliminate email overload
- Employees spend nearly 25% of their time doing email. If instead, it was a quick message via Microsoft Teams, this would drastically decrease
- Eliminate communication silos
- With improved communication, employees can use the right methods and tools to share information so that it doesn’t become trapped by a single person.
- Improve interdepartmental communication
- By creating connections across your organization, it allows different departments to be in sync. Think product meets marketing. If no one from the product team has an open line of communication with marketing, new features and plans can be misconstrued by the marketing team.
4. Coffee Chats can spark new ideas in a company
These chats can be a great medium to promote company-wide idea generation and create new initiatives. It’s a great way to find mutual interests between co-workers to create clubs or groups. Sometimes, people just need to bounce their idea off someone to start the momentum of making something happen. After all, it’s much harder to start something on your own than with someone else. Nowadays it’s easier than ever to create a new group. Just open up a new MS Teams channel and invite those you think would be interested. Finding people who are interested in the hard part.
5. Random coffee chats place less emphasis on any social dynamic
Social dynamics and hierarchies are important at any organization though they can decrease morale. People often feel intimidated when speaking with someone who’s higher up the food chain during a meeting or in the office. By creating a level playing field and matching one another together for coffee, there is less emphasis on the social hierarchy. Maybe someone wants to change departments in a company but doesn’t know how to engage with the manager of that department. Coffee chats get people over the hurdle of putting themselves out there.
Often, cliques emerge within organizations. These can create pockets of a trusted group of individuals who hold in information. By building deeper relationships between everyone in an organization, these pockets of trust can expand to create a more productive organization.
If you think coffee chats could benefit your organization, add the CoffeePals app to your team today and start building a connected organization.
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