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> If you only interact during scheduled meetings with a defind purpose, you never engage in work-related small talk

Whats stopping people from scheduling “shoot the shit” of coffee calls though? That’s what I’ve seen many do since the wfh mandate and it works in exactly the same way you describe: people vent, talk about what happened during meetings, etc.

It feels very artificial and takes a lot more planning. I still do this sometimes but it's not the same.

Why does it require a lot of planning? I do this, usually it's "bored, coffee break?" "Yep" or I ask a question on slack and the other party says "call?"

Because IRL you're effectively always in call. Not sure whats hard to understand about the difference.

I just don't see the difference. When I worked in an office I'd wander over to a colleague and say "coffee?" Now I open a dm and say "coffee call?"

I hate online coffee chats and love workplace conversation. Coffee chats have an overloaded amount of assumptions — conversation should start off personal, last for x minutes, make you feel closer to a teammate.

This is the exact opposite of a hallway conversation that can be about anything. It can differ based on the person and your relationship.

Yeah I'm not keen on the organized chats. We did those pre pandemic and I got nothing from them. Casual conversation has to be adhoc, whether it's in person or by call.

Our director started scheduling a big group video meeting with all the people that started since 2020 just as a chat room. But he did absolutely 0 planning or conversation guiding or anything outside of "so who wants to talk about something?" and we would just sit there in silence.

It completely feels like the scene from Arrested Development where Gob yells "everybody dance, NOW".

My team kept a Webex room open at the start of every morning for just turning up and chatting in; it would generally stay open in the background until everyone had left for meetings. It certainly worked well for us. Sometimes people just worked silently through it, but usually there was lots of chat.

We don't have something like this (except for the bullshitting that usually occurs in the last few minutes of standup) but I'm thinking we should try it.

Not at all the same. Most people will just go back to their own stuff behind the camera. Also, Zoom is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're talking at a monitor, not a person!

If you're allowed the "exhaustion" excuse, then I'm certainly allowed the same excuse for not going into the office! In-person interaction is EXHAUSTING for a lot of people. You're trying to absorb dozens more nonverbal cues at once!

An example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"

A lot of that seems to happen over Slack already - whether you're in the meeting or at home.

How would you know? The very nature of that communication is that it’s private.

Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

How would you know? The very nature of that communication is that it’s private.

How would I know that these conversations happen over Slack? Because I've participated in them, either in DM's or small private channels. And this was commonplace well before the pandemic and WFH started.

Maybe nobody talks to you in person, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

It's hard to have a private in-person conversation outside of a meeting room in a typical open-office setup -- breakroom conversations tend to get heard by people that you don't want to hear them.

It’s really not hard to have private convos in an open office setup, I did it for years and years. Nobody cares about you or what you’re saying.

I would find it highly suspicious if someone tried to have a backroom convo with me on a digital platform.

I find it hard to have any conversations at all in an open office setup, just like it's hard to get work done in that environment. Open office setups amplify all of the downsides of working in an office.

I am a lot more open in honest in person than I am on Slack, because I know everything I say on Slack is logged and can bite me in the ass years down the line.

We have a very strict Slack retention policy, both DM's and messages in user created private channels self destruct in 7 days with no possibility of retrieval. Public channels and designated private channels can have a longer lifetime. And they really are gone, a VP tried to retrieve some 2 week old messages and was unable to.

So the only fear is someone in IT snooping your private channel during the week that the messages are alive -- probably less than the chance of the person you're talking about standing around the corner.

I am just the opposite. On slack, I can think through what I want to say to make sure I'm conveying what I intend to convey. In person, I can't do that at all.

> example might be, "You know, I didn't want to say anything in the meeting, but doesn't Greg's data lake proposal sound exactly like the project that failed two years ago?"

The failure there is that the person is afraid to tell that in the meeting. He or she has to rely on backchannel.