Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Before we get to today's mini episode, I just wanted to do a bit of a call out for listener questions.
As you know, I'm starting to do a few more episodes where I'm answering any questions that might be on your mind around work, maybe remote work and working from home, about productivity, any of those areas. So if you've got something on your mind that you'd like me to delve into the research around and to answer on How I Work, drop me a note at Amantha at Inventium dot com dot au and my email is always in the show
notes as well. Okay, let's get on today's mini episode, which is all around the topic of serendipitous conversations and how can that actually happen in the virtual world. So a few months ago, my CEO at Inventim Mish sent me an email asking what I thought about a kind of loose idea that she had for a new product for Inventium. She suggested that I sit on it for a few days and circle back if I was able
to develop it a little bit further. So I started to flesh it out, and we tuned and throwed bainly over email for the next week, with a couple of phone conversations thrown in the mix. And then four months later we launched the idea and it's actually proving to
be a most profitable product for twenty twenty. And you know, while many managers are lamenting the death of serendipitous conversations due to remote working, there are actually strategies that can be used to build them into our virtual work date. So my first piece of advice is to create a virtual hallway. One of the challenges of video meetings is that they don't allow for the ad hoc conversations that
happen immediately before and after these events. There are some researchers at MIT that are attempting to solve this problem with Mingler spelled miglr so. Mingla is software that facilitates spontaneous chat with those who are free to be interrupted or stick around after the official meeting ends. Other software solutions tackle the challenge of replacing corridor conversations with ones
that can take place in a virtual hallway. So donut spelled like the thing that you eat, introduces new team members who have never previously met, and also makes it easy to schedule virtual coffees with co walkers workers, and hallway ha l lway makes it easy to schedule time for informal breaks in addition to letting you put a time limit on the breaks, which are kind of feel like corridor conversations or be it with a time limit,
which to me feels somewhat efficient. Now, another thing that you might want to try is renting a virtual office. So if scheduling water cooler conversations feels contrived, another solution is to create a virtual office, so using software such as Tandem tand EM, you can be working with your co workers, albeit virtually, and can interrupt and collaborate on
digital documents spontaneously, just like you would in a physical office. Alternatively, a method we have experimented with at Inventium is running virtual caves so, inspired by a company called cave Date, every couple of weeks we schedule two to three hour
blocks of time for the entire team. Everyone brings along tasks that they want to complete, and we all are gone to Google hangouts and have a brief chat about what we'll be working on, and then we schedule a halfway break for chitchat, which is essentially water cooler comonation,
and then we just get on with it. So research demonstrates that when accountability is increased at the team level, as it is through running a virtual cave, teams actually become more interdependent, experience higher success, and are more satisfied with fellow team members. So in addition to promoting serendipitous conversation, we also get a great deal of work done. Now a couple of other things that you might want to
think about now. This third tip, I just call it take five because while technology solutions abound, going old school and getting on the phone can have its advantages. One of the challenges from working from home is that we can often go for too long without a proper break thanks to back to back zoom meetings. So research from the University of Colorado uncovered that there is an optimal length of time for breaks. The researchers found that, in
contrast to one thirty minute break. Hourly five minute walking breaks boost energy, shop and focus, improve mood, and reduce feel fatigue in the afternoon more effectively. So as such, try to take multiple short breaks throughout the day and use this time to either organize a quick call with coworkers or maybe call them spontaneously for some serendipitous conversation.
My final tip is to curate your virtual background. It's one of the best ways to promote creativity is to surround the brain with lots of diverse stimulus, which will help derive more creative water cooler conversations. Exposure to diverse and random stimulus triggers more thoughts in the brain, which increases the number of new thoughts and ideas that pop up. So if your virtual backdrop is a plain white wall, this does not bode well for promoting creativity with your
co workers. Instead, curate your background and consider changing it regularly. Australian finance reporter Alan Cohler changes the books on display at his desk every day, provoking much online conversation. Likewise, play around with quirky virtual backgrounds to promote diverse thinking. So while it's easy to lament the death of serendipitous conversation in the virtual world. Start consciously curating the new version of these conversations and watch the ideas flow. That
is it for today's show. If you found this episode useful, why not share it with someone else that you think could benefit. And a big shout out to everyone that has left reviews for How I Work. It's simply awesome. It brings a huge smile to my face whenever I get to read a new review and get listener feedback. So thank you for everyone that has done that. That is it for today's show and I will see you next time.