The water cooler at GetIT is not a very popular place, but that’s not the case in most companies. Water cooler talk, or the “grapevine”, is the lifeblood of many organizations, though it’s not acknowledged as such by most. What then is this water cooler? Quite literally, it is the water cooler in the office where people visit throughout the day, randomly and frequently. However, it is often referred to as a metaphor for the informal organization within a company – the norms people follow when they don’t have time to do it the right way all the time, based on
who knows what, who gets things done, who has influence and power, and who must agree before an idea can be effectively implemented.
image courtesy -Mainman-
In these “by-the-way” and “did-you-know” chats, people ask about ongoing work, bounce ideas off one another, and get advice on how to solve problems. Not only are they therefore critical in spurring new ideas, but also in promoting the feeling of being “in” the stream of things.
However, now with people dispersed across wide geographies, working from home, collaborating across workgroups that are not always physically working together, there are fewer face-to-face water cooler chat, potentially weakening this sense of community. Isolation and alienation are natural consequences. This is where Web 2.0-powered social media technologies can help.
One of the defining traits of water cooler talk is its intrinsically informal, unsupervised, “care-two-hoots-about-the-reporting-chain” attitude. And social media technologies are a natural fit. Blogging, wikis, twittering, rating and voting systems are based on the idea that there is value outside the traditional channels of power, that the innovation of the collective is king, and not dominance of the elite, that managers are not the only clever people in the room anymore.
Creating this “virtual water cooler” though is not as easy as just creating the blog and wiki software and “getting out of the way.” Begin simply with a discussion group (still one of the most popular forms of virtual interactions) and Yammer (twitter for companies), and progressively build upon it with blogs, wikis, and the like. Encourage people to play with these tools and let them figure out ways to make it part of their workflow. Remember, it’s not something for “management” to design and “enforce.” Like the real water cooler, some tools and topics will prosper, while others will die a natural death. That is not to say management relinquishes all – their role would be one of facilitating these conversations. Managers would be in charge of “tuning in” to this virtual grapevine to find out the needs of employees scattered across the world and ensuring such needs are met.
Next up: some surprising benefits of the virtual water cooler.
