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Dear OOO,
A couple of colleagues have been organizing virtual events for our office: happy ones, curiosity sessions and the like. They happen at the end of the day when I’m tired, trying to finish my work so I can end the session and when I’m tired of Zoom. So I’m not going to go. But in an effort to “get more people involved,” we received a couple of other abstentions and a place to host the next event. So … what makes a good virtual office hangout and how can I turn it into something I don’t hate?
“Sarah, Chicago.”
The short answer, Sara, is that you have to play The risk. Everyone loves Jeopardy, and Jeopardy Labs allows you to create the category tables you want, be it dark art history or dark office jokes. (I swear this is not a sponge for this random website). The closest fun I’ve had during many quarantine virtual hangouts was Jeopardy.
That said, we are missing some crucial information: how much is your office? Jeopardy won’t work with more than five or six people, and it’s not fun to see other people playing trivia. Most of the activities that can be played online will actually be a lot more fun than with a few people. Games are out there if you don’t have a small workplace. (If you don’t work in a small business, can you plan something for your department instead of the entire office?) There are experiential options (cooking class, magic show, you get it), but here’s a related issue. . Only those who leave your co-workers will talk and the rest of you will be joking with a couple of class clowns. Quiet. Sounds exciting!
This leaves a generic “happy hour” approach. This is, in my humble opinion, the worst case scenario. (Sorry for inviting me to a virtual happy hour in the last 14 months; you are the perfect angel and I am sure your the happy ones are wonderful.) The video chat bends slightly at the base; the more difficult it is to read social signals, the harder it is to synchronize the time of conversations due to various delays on the Internet. The more people you add to the room, the worse these problems get. More or less than six people will all go to talk to each other — or worse, they will be silent for fear of talking to each other. I’ve seen people try to add a discussion invitation to focus on the conversation and allow everyone to talk, but then you risk feeling things too much for any other meeting or kindergarten show and account.
Of course, simple social hangouts during the coronavirus era also have these problems. When it comes to office politics, then, you’ll have problems (and we don’t have a thorny question about whether or not to drink on screen or just drink alone in your living room). A paper this week Journal of Applied Psychology they have seen that the more disconnected people feel from others in a video conference, the greater the fatigue they feel. Ergo, hangouts with colleagues you don’t know well are likely to be more tiring and less enjoyable. You can bounce the beauty of an IRL office meeting from one group to another; online, you’re a captive of that guy who kidnaps all conversations. In most of these virtual events, there is not enough shared purpose to reflect things in a natural way. If you and your colleagues work in the same place, I can offer an untitled endorsement for park meetings that have become basic for WIRED teams in San Francisco and New York.
If you’re scattered, though, Jeopardy remains my answer. In the case of other options, my not-so-worrying colleagues have published all sorts of great online guides karaoke and party games and movie-watching parties and remote cooperative games. All of these could not convince me that after spending more hours I want to spend more time online with a team of my (wonderful!) Colleagues, but your mileage can change.
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