by Alfonz Martinez and Cristian Sances
Chapter 2 – Lessons learned from our Scrum Masters
Are you living alone? Let’s have a virtual coffee together!
We all know it, Covid-19 killed human interactions. But there are two different contexts our ERNIans are living nowadays
For those that live with their husband/wife, kids, pets.. it could be annoying but at least they have someone to talk to.
But… what happens with our colleagues that are home alone or are sharing a flat and often spend most of the time in a room? And what about our foreign colleagues, far from their families. All of them have great friendships with other ERNIans but now they probably feel more lonely than usual.
All these questions were answered at ERNI with the Virtual Coffee initiative. It is an opportunity to socialize, to meet your mates with a coffee in a virtual room where you can talk about everything: videogames, music, exercise routines, etc.
The benefits of this initiative are:
– Help your team mates to win isolation.
– Help those that are far from home to combat homesickness.
– Clear your head from work and from the actual global situation.
– Boost your team work.
You only need to schedule it, find the right time, the right content and the right people to meet. Why not meeting your colleagues every day in a Virtual Coffee after your working time? Or at lunch?
At ERNI we are following up how good Virtual Coffees are collecting weekly what works and what not. As you know, the first topic we tried to fix was the overreporting (first post of the series). But after that one, the most important topic our scrums masters came with was how to boost people interactions virtually.
We are asking people to lead the initiative and break the ice. We have to use our daily working tools for socializing… and this takes time..
We also encourage you to include your customers and partners. At ERNI we launched these initiatives with some of our customers, we are inviting Product Owners, Managers, etc. We are all affected by this exceptional situation, its time to remove borders and to be inclusive.
