Have you found virtual social events an effective way to connect with others?

Yes, it has certainly helped keep us connected and engaged.

Virtual events have been extremely helpful for keeping morale up, and building relationships. Our IT Team does a monthly trivia event using Kahoot. We encourage active banter and chatting during the quiz. Small funny prizes are awarded to the winners.

When you have a recurring meeting on your calendar that says happy hour, it doesn't become a happy hour. It becomes a meeting. What we've done is after 2:00PM local time, there are no meetings and no expectation that you'll actually be working on something. So you can have that time, especially before schools open, to go out and do something or plan a long weekend.

Our rule for our happy hours is that if you talk about work, you get assigned story points, which helped to keep us on track. But I think it's at the point where the fatigue from Zoom outweighs the benefits of having the opportunity to connect with somebody outside of work. Everybody's tired of seeing people in 2D. They want to get to know each other in 3D, especially now that things have opened up more. So I've been thinking about suspending those for the duration of the summer and because our happy hours were around 3:30PM, just encouraging them to stop working at that time, go out and start their weekend.

It worked for a while. But then everybody's lives got to their new normal and Friday or Saturday night things couldn’t really happen anymore. Also, summer came and once school got out, people spent their evenings doing things with their families more. So instead of being weekly, the Saturday night events happened every other week, then it was monthly and now I can't remember when the last one was.

Now we’re just trying to make sure to have touch points, at least with the people you work with, work for and who work for you. I always start off my one-on-one conversations with, "How are you? What's new outside of work? What have you found outside of work to keep you busy?" to help lighten things before talking about work.