When the pandemic hit and forced all of us to suddenly stay at home, we all had different experiences no need to go into details. After months of remote working and understanding it would take a while to go back to the office. In our team we started noticing the lack of diverse topics we talked about, well mainly we talked about tickets, deploys and tech issues.

Zoom Fatigue?

As the months pass we, as everyone in the world, had the need to socialize more with our team. Bring back our coffee talks, lunch breaks' jokes, and random conversations. We tried many things, online coffe breaks, sharing virtual lunches. They all generated great engagement at the beginning but after a few weeks they disappeared in the horizon with not many of us missing them.

Let's keep looking

After some research trying to see what worked for others around the world, we found “Connect around the (virtual) watercooler.” basically a conversation starter via slack. So we thought why not?

How does it work? The app will post one question each day at the same time to a slack channel, that will help start a conversation.

After trying the free version we found the conversations lacked some context and internal jokes. So we created our own tool.

Freestyle's Fridays

Mad Collective provide us with some spare time on friday’s afternoons for learning, trying some new technology, personal development, and/or finding tools that might help the team.

One Friday afternoon with the simplest tools we had at hand we created our own “Conversations starter in slack”. Patent pending

Our Solution

• A Google spreadsheet
• A Google calendar
• A Slack channel with a google calendar integration.

Basically we add the questions to a spreadsheet then we run a script (added in app script in the doc itself) that creates a calendar appointment for the day and after this we added a calendar integration to slack that will post the “appointment/question” every day at the same time.

The team answers whenever they have some free time, could be right away or the next day. Better if lots of GIFs are added.

How it looks

Ice-Breakers

There are thousands of ice-breakers questions already out there so with some curating and adding some personal interests from people in the team we got a nice pool to start with and test if we could generate more engagement.

Some examples

Questions

• What's the craziest conversation you overheard? 👂
• What is the programming language you hate the most? ⌨️ 💻 0️⃣ 1️⃣ 0️⃣
• What scientific discovery would change the course of humanity overnight if it was discovered? 🤯

For storytelling

• Let's created a story! Use only one word or two words at the time 📝

For Trivia week

• Which famous computer scientist killed himself by eating a posion apple? hint --> 🤖 🧠 🧪
• Guess the movie: "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads". ⚡🔥

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Final Thoughts

Not all questions generate the same level of interest but after almost two years we already have ~400 questions asked, many more internal jokes, and know more about some team members than we did before. Maybe too much 😉