Skyler's Thoughts #2
Making new connections and building your company culture with a simple tool
Background
Sometime back in 2018 my Mom was reading a Montreal Gazette article about a company that had implemented a tool that automatically assigns their employees a new coworker biweekly to meet up with and grab a coffee in order to promote social relationships within their company. It was a way to meet new people outside of the team or organization.
My mom summarized the article to me and said “That sounds like something Lightspeed would enjoy”. I thought to myself that does sound like something Lightspeed would enjoy…
Let me brief you on the context
This was pre-covid era when work from the office was the norm and going in 5 days a week was common. We worked from home on occasion if necessary but it wasn’t a must-have like remote work is today. I was working at Lightspeed as an intermediate developer on the payments team. At the time, Lightspeed had multiple offices around the globe: Montreal (HQ), Toronto, NYC, London, Amsterdam, Ghent, Manila, and I’m probably forgetting a couple more.
It was just grand walking through the halls of the castle (seriously look at this former luxury hotel and train station turned tech office) and meeting new colleagues haphazardly just by saying hello or waiting behind them in line for the microwave. It was really nice to have that organic socialization.
But the more the company grew and became distributed globally, the harder it was to get to know your colleagues whether they were in another country or in the same office but 4 floors away.
Personally, I thrive on my social battery and keeping it charged is part of what makes me do great work as a developer.
So I took my mom’s idea from that Gazette article and decided that I would try to make a coffee chat program happen.
Step 1: MVP
I asked some of my teammates and fellow colleagues on other teams in my department as well as a few members from other departments (to keep things spicy you know?) if they would be interested in meeting someone random in that group every 2 weeks. Some people said 2 weeks was too much to commit, others tried it and said it wasn’t for them, others again loved the idea and looked forward to the next one.
The first iteration of this was done in a Google sheet and while the exercise was pretty successful, the execution was tough. How do you prevent people from being paired with the same partner? How do you make intros?
Step 2: Enter donut
I need to shoutout a couple of my former colleagues without whom this never would have found success. I have enormous respect for both of them and each was instrumental in helping me at various points in my career. Both are net positive people with infectious energy: HRBP Extraordinaire Anne-Marie Fortin & amazing coach Antonio Carruyo Romero
I asked Anne-Marie if she would be able to help me execute this pairing system since she had access to all of the HR info at Lightspeed. She suggested I speak with Antonio who had a similar idea previously but no one to help him execute it with his busy schedule.
Antonio LOVED the idea and had just the tool to help do the pairing, and it was a slack integration to boot! Enter donut
In a donutshell, it’s a slack integration you can add to a channel and it will pair everyone in that channel in groups of 2, 3, 4, etc. Most of the pairing options were configurable such as frequency, group size, first message, follow-up reminders etc. It’s a great tool. Now their product offerings have increased and they target additional customer segments such as hybrid workers and remote-only as well!
With that, the slack channel #coffee-pals was born!
Antonio helped me to configure the first round, we invited some people and got to matching! I had some great conversations and met really interesting people right at the beginning. Even if I got paired with someone I knew, it was a chance to take 30 minutes out of your work day and just connect with someone. What a pleasure.
Step 3: CEO endorsement
After a couple of months of organic growth, then-CEO Dax Dasilva plugged #coffee-pals at an all-company meeting and joined himself so that if you were in that channel, you had a small chance at getting a coveted 30 minute coffee pal with the legend himself!
That is when the channel took off. HR also added all of the new hires each week into the channel which served as a great jumping off point for camaraderie
Step 4: Product Market Fit
The channel’s size would ebb and flow, some people disliked being added to the channel as they didn’t seek social interactions outside of their control which I can fully respect. Not everyone has the same social desires as I do.
Some people liked the concept but could not adhere to the schedule so they would miss 3 or 4 coffee pals and that leaves the other side a bit sour if they get no one to meet. There were settings to re-pair people and allow you to opt out for x weeks if you were going on vacation for example.
But in general the problem of “I want to meet people at my company who I otherwise would not have a chance to socialize with” was solved via the use of the donut slack integration and a couple of people doing occasional admin work.
Conclusion:
I left Lightspeed for the 2nd time around (that’s worthy of another post) in June of 2022 and the #coffee-pals channel was still going strong. In order for the bot to not be shut down by mistake which happened when Antonio left the company, I needed to add multiple admins so someone would be there to catch the passed baton. As far as I know it’s still going strong!
The number of people positively impacted by this socializing tool with a comparatively small amount of work is HUGE. All it took was an idea, a couple of people with a vision, and an easy to use slack bot.
Actionable Tip
If you have an idea or a vision that will generate net positivity in the lives of others, then you must attempt to make it happen
I probably dedicated 25 or 30 hours in the first few months of the coffee chat/#coffee-pals initiative and Antonio maybe 10-15. After that, it basically was on auto-pilot. Once per week, an HRBP would spend 5 minutes adding new hires to the channel and I might spend 15 minutes answering people in the channel or dealing with any settings changes.
That amounts to less than 1 working week for 1 human and there have been thousands of meetings since and many friendships and bonds made along the way.
Think about the enormous impact you could make on a company’s culture with an idea and some effort. Listening to people’s feedback was a big part of it to get the cadence and settings just right too.
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