This far into an unprecedented year, I’m willing to bet that you have your remote workflow down pat. You know when to start your day, how to reach out to clients and teammates for help, and what to do if Zoom crashes during an important meeting. You’ve figured out how to share your space with the people you live with, maybe even how to lead teams effectively and find professional development while working from home. But what about those idle moments talking with coworkers? Have you figured out how to replicate those? 

The Cambridge Dictionary defines “chit-chat” as “informal conversations about matters that are not important.” While this definition is factually correct, when it comes to building a workplace culture and developing inter-team camaraderie, chit-chat is vitally important. Surely, some bonds come from working hard together and sharing professional goals, but they’re just as likely to come from an idle talk that happens during those moments in-between tasks, the ones that used to happen in break rooms and by water coolers. The phrase “water-cooler moment” has persisted so long because talking to your coworkers about non-work topics—whether “Game of Thrones” or the big game the night before—is a huge part of everyone’s work experience.

The value of maintaining these types of connections and conversations is twofold. First, it helps strengthen your company culture at a time when team-building off-sites aren’t possible for most people. You don’t want to turn your work experience into a simple matter of getting the job done; our careers are so much more than that. Second, they provide an invaluable human connection at a time when meeting our friends from a drink on Friday night or a movie on Saturday afternoon is no easy task. This connection in turn leads to increased morale and a shared sense of accountability. Hence, the importance of a virtual water cooler. 

When I say “virtual water cooler,” I simply mean a forum to talk about matters that are blissfully unrelated to the task at hand. You could create this forum via Slack, Zoom, text message, email, or any other medium you see fit. Odds are, some of your employees already have such a forum, but it’s a great idea to add a company-sanctioned one. You may want to add a more structured option, like a book club, or choose to keep things more freeform. No matter the structure you opt for, the key is to not over-police the space. Obviously, you need some guidelines as to which topics shouldn’t be covered so as to avoid any problems, but the whole idea is to give people a place to shoot the breeze. If people are spending time laughing at silly jokes and discussing what they’re watching on Netflix, you’re on the right track. 

It’s a strange position to be a leader advocating that your team members spend time discussing things that aren’t their work, but nothing about 2020 has been normal. These types of conversations didn’t have a need to be promoted because they used to happen automatically. In a world where we don’t have natural spaces to congregate and moments of downtime when we fill our coffees and grab a snack from the fridge, it’s on leadership to create avenues for team members to talk, laugh, and become closer to one another. Even if we’re working remotely, we shouldn’t feel like we’re alone. 

All too often, we ask a round of questions at the beginning of a meeting and pretend that it’s a sufficient way to stay in touch while we all shelter in place. I’m a fan of these round-robin sessions, but are they really enough? I would argue they’re not. Some of the best team-building comes in unstructured interactions, the kind of stuff you can’t make happen. What you can do, however, is provide a space for these types of conversations, even if it’s not a physical one.