Your employee retention depends on meaningful connections.
Whether your employees stay or move on partly depends on how connected they feel to their colleagues. In a remote environment, that connection is created through meaningful interactions (a term coined by McKinsey in their research about the great attrition).
You can schedule interactions between specific people. You can’t schedule serendipity among random employees, though. So how do you facilitate connections without a cafeteria or a water cooler?
You can influence conversations through frameworks that facilitate connection without forcing them.
Regular 1-1s between employees and their managers, recurring team meetings, and all-hands meetings are only the first layer of communication in your company. The second layer is made up of talking to people with similar interests, most often by chance, such as running into them at the coffee machine. Even in a virtual space, you can influence these encounters.
Understanding the different types of networks within companies and how to spot them
Proven strategies to increase the likelihood for people to share meaningful interactions outside of official meetings
Ideas for how to model personal connections without oversharing