Sharing Is Caring — How We Engineered New Hire Virtual Happy Hours at Storyblocks

As a new hire, getting to know your coworkers can be challenging. When you add remote work and a large engineering team of 40+ people to the mix, it may feel like an insurmountable challenge. Before COVID-19, our engineering team was primarily in the office, and we prided ourselves on a culture where everyone got to know everyone personally and felt connected. When a new hire joined our engineering team, we had in-person lunches, happy hours, and other informal and formal events to help them get to know their direct and extended engineering team, and vice versa.

When the pandemic hit and we knew we were remote for the foreseeable future, the “getting to know someone new” method we used before could no longer be applied. We experimented with a few virtual happy hour ideas and over the last few years, we’ve worked out what we call the “show and tell” happy hour.

This process can be summed up in 5 steps:

Find a space that isn’t Zoom (or your usual virtual platform)

This can be a challenge, but given that most people spend a good portion of their week in meetings, using your virtual meeting tool for a fun activity does not help make that something everyone will want to attend. For our events, we use Wonder which allows us to mimic a more natural social dynamic as people can wander into various “circles” and start conversations with others as they wish.

Structure helps!

We first take the number of new hires we have for the event and divide them into even small groups (normally of one or two people per group). We then assign each group a leader who is in charge of breaking the ice and encouraging interactions. When the event begins, as tenured members join, have them evenly divided among the groups. Once everyone has joined, we have the new hires rotate throughout the vent, normally once every 15 minutes, and the tenured employees stay in their groups. This ensures the new hire gets to meet all of the tenured employees who joined the event.

Introductions are important

For each rotation, have everyone introduce themselves briefly. For our events, we like to have everyone say how long they have been with our organization, the functional team they work on, and a fun fact about themselves. If you want to keep things silly, have it be the answer to a fun question like “what animal would you be?” or “what is your favorite breakfast cereal?” This helps everyone put a name to a face and feel comfortable with others in their group.

Share something meaningful

For each group rotation, each person should share an item they have that is meaningful to them and explain why or what the meaning is. If there is a story behind it, this is a great time to tell it and let others get to know them a little bit better. Ideally, everyone shares something each rotation, but if you are short on time, just have the new hire share their item. This is something the event organizer should mention as an expectation before the meeting begins in the invite.

Do this frequently

We like to have this event once every quarter. This keeps the event feeling fresh and gives the new hires a chance to meet everyone early in their career at Storyblocks.

The “show and tell” happy hour is an excellent way to welcome new hires to your team, especially in a remote work environment. We hope these ideas inspire you to create similar experiences for your team. If you’d like to join us and go through one of these yourself, we are hiring!