Cerego’s Remote Water Cooler

How we’ve grown our office culture by embracing remote work

There’s no shortage of advice going around about moving to remote work these days. Lots of it is quite good, too! But Cerego stumbled onto something last week that seems to work pretty well, and I haven’t seen it described anywhere, so I wanted to share our approach to the “Remote Water Cooler.”

Context

The Cerego family (full time, contractors) is a bit under 50 people. Ordinarily, about 30% of the team is remote across 6 states; the rest of us work from our office in San Francisco. Like most primarily on-site companies, we find that being together in a room is critical for spontaneous innovation, situational awareness between teams, and morale in general.

What we did

So to replicate our office kitchen / gathering spot, we decided to create an always-on Zoom video call. Folks can jump in and jump out between meetings or if they’re working on something that doesn’t require full concentration. To the extent people use it, it works just like a physical gathering spot: you never know who will be there, and you can’t predict what people will be talking about.

How we did it

1. We created a new Zoom user. This way, the host of the “remote water cooler” wouldn’t have to end the meeting to join other meetings throughout the day. (Making a new user is easy. In our case, we just used an existing company email address and added “+zoom”)
2. This new Zoom user turns on its Personal Meeting ID (PMI) and…never turns it off. The PMI doesn’t change, which makes it easy for people to remember what the URL is
3. This seems small, but is important: you can make multiple people the hosts of a zoom meeting. You can even do this for a PMI. We made a bunch of people the alternative hosts, so that if the meeting disconnects (e.g. after 40 minutes of no activity), multiple people can restart it.
4. We created a new Slack channel (#remote-water-cooler) and we pinned the Zoom URL there for reference. Folks occasionally ask questions in the channel (if there is a question about the video chat)
5. Various team members informally encourage others to jump into the room (e.g. at the start of the day, around lunch, as people wrap up). Early on in this new way of working, it’s helpful to build new muscles and remind people about new routines

That’s it!

Impromptu concerts have been a feature of our #remote-water-cooler experience

In addition to the benefits we were expecting (ad hoc human contact; easy way to find someone if they’re online), we’ve had a few surprising observations too:

1. People are using the audience in the remote water cooler to pressure-test ideas (e.g. test out ideas for marketing campaigns and sales collateral)
2. Folks are using the remote water cooler to report bugs and get technical questions answered
3. One member of our team (a fantastic guitarist) holds occasional concerts (see above)! He notifies the Slack channel 10 minutes in advance, then plays a few songs to take a break with a live audience. It’s pretty great

So, in this time of social distancing, one of the most important things we can do is to find new ways to stay connected and keep our sense of normal. Thanks to the growing number of digital options out there for face-to-face meetings, it’s possible to get to collaborate with colleagues in ways that weren’t obvious, or even available, in a traditional office setting (like having impromptu classical guitar concerts at lunch).

At Cerego, we know that the same is possible for teaching and learning situations — while it’s certainly an adjustment period for many, we understand that, as an industry, we’re just starting to scratch the surface in terms of the potential of online learning. That’s why we’re working hard to empower instructors and learners with the most effective technology available, based on both cognitive science and artificial intelligence. And we are seeing already that, for learning, the learning results can be even better with Cerego than with traditional methods alone.

While we know that the coming weeks and months are likely to present a host of new challenges, our hope is that we keep our minds open to new ideas and new solutions that will not only serve us in the short term but also prove valuable in the future.