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If you work remotely at least a few days out of the week, you’ll know full well that remote work means more freedom and more flexibility.
It also means having to grind your coffee beans with your own coffee grinder before downing a cuppa all alone on your lunch break, instead of chatting away to a colleague you’ve met hanging out by the office coffee machine.
“What’s the big deal?” some may argue. “A casual chat isn’t work, and I’m not being productive if I’m yapping!” As it turns out, this isn’t exactly true.
The spontaneous face-to-face interactions that offices are known for hold so much hidden value that even the biggest proponents of working from home have been scrambling to find ways to replicate them online.
Some call it ‘office coffee culture’, others refer to it as the ‘water cooler effect’. Let’s take a closer look at what water dispensers and coffee machines have to do with productivity in the workplace.
The Water Cooler Effect, or the Role of the Coffee Chat
Asked where work happens in the office, you’d probably pick the work desk or the meeting room. Things like water coolers, coffee machines, and break rooms in general are seen as work-adjacent: these are places you pop into to get away from your job for a while, to recharge, to catch a breath before diving straight back into your to-do list.
What’s often overlooked is how crucial these third spaces are when it comes to building relationships and promoting collaboration. Think about it: have you ever had a casual chat with a new colleague during lunch, then had them pop into your head suddenly when mulling over who could help you with a task you’ve been struggling with for ages?
That’s the water cooler effect in action – and, despite its laid-back nature, it makes some serious business happen.
Why the water cooler? The name goes back to the 1900s. That’s when, as a mere hygiene measure, the first water coolers popped up in factories and offices. While they were supposed to simply stop the spread of germs, it soon became apparent this wasn’t all these appliances were doing: they also encouraged workers to chat casually to each other while filling their cups or bottles.
Managers weren’t impressed at first. People were supposed to work, not share the latest office gossip! By the middle of the 20th century, however, researchers had begun to notice that casual chit-chat was far from useless.
In addition to promoting hygiene, the water cooler provided a space to decompress, inspired innovation, boosted collaboration across departments, and improved employee retention rates. In short, it turned into a veritable hub of office culture.
Eventually, random office interactions came to be seen as part and parcel of a regular, productive work day – all thanks to the discovery of the water cooler effect
From Water Coolers to Virtual Spaces: Generating Spontaneity Online
As time went on, the privileged position of water coolers was usurped by office coffee machines. The casual coffee chat was now a simple fact of office life—until the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Take this piece of statistics, for example: compared to around 5% of Americans working from home full-time before the lockdowns, this number had shot up to 37% by April 2020. While some have since returned to their office desks, a considerable portion of the workforce has chosen to stay home at least a couple of days out of the working week. Where does that leave the good old water cooler? Well, it certainly leaves it – and the office culture it represents – seriously disrupted.
Time for your lunch break? If you work remotely, the only person you could possibly stumble upon on your way to the kitchen is likely to be your remote-working spouse or roommate. No new colleagues for you to meet while you choose between an espresso and a cappuccino. No random problem-solving to engage in. Nobody to drop you a useful tip as you’re munching away on your salad.
In other words, while a lack of spontaneous chit-chat may seem like a small price to pay for the flexibility associated with working from home, there’s actually more at stake if the water cooler effect is allowed to dissipate: it’s collaboration, cohesion, and connection.
There have been plenty of attempts to recreate the effects of the break room when working remotely. From informal weekly lunch meetings on Teams to random Slack chat rooms dedicated to anything from gardening to memes, lots of companies are nowadays exploring the possibilities of remote spontaneity.
ools like Gather Town have popped up, offering an opportunity to create custom virtual workspaces that mimic real-life offices. Slack boasts an app called Donut designed to generate random connections and facilitate workplace friendships.
These are all promising solutions in what seems to be an increasingly remote-first world – and yet the question of whether true spontaneity can ever be intentionally crafted still remains to be definitively answered.
Casual, or Crucial?
Whether it’s a water cooler, a coffee machine, or a random group chat, it’s clear that what may seem like casual conversation is actually a crucial element of any modern workplace.
Want to be productive? Go grab a cup of coffee with a colleague, or drop a coworker a friendly message: perhaps that’s just the random push you need.
