Automate Virtual Coffee Breaks | Bringing People Together in the Digital Age

Introduction

The social aspects of working in a remote team can be difficult for remote workers. With few exceptions, we rarely see each other in person, and when we do, we're rarely in the same physical location. You can get stuck in your home office with no real meaningful interaction with your co-workers other than work-related interactions.
One great way to help manage these difficulties is to arrange virtual coffee chats, or “virtual coffees” for short. And, yes, virtual coffees are becoming increasingly trendy. It's a smart way to have real interactions in an online meeting and make remote work feel a little less solitary. People have been finding out that it does wonders for team building, company culture and creates a more enjoyable workspace!

What are Virtual Coffees?

Virtual coffees are meetups where team members get together to "drink coffee" and informally discuss the goings on within their team. At these meetings, everyone contributes in some way to the conversation, and people have a chance to get to know each other better, schedule a time, grab your favorite video conferencing tool and give virtual coffees a go!

Virtual coffee meetings can really be about anything, though, you could gather some ice breaker questions or conversation starters to your team to spice up virtual coffees and get everyone to know each other better and get along! A quick virtual coffee chat can not only make a work day more exciting and fun but also bring a long a lot of long-term benefits to your workplace.

The benefits of a virtual coffee meeting are numerous. First, they provide a way for team members to get to know each other better, which helps them learn to work together. Also they help teammates bond over similar opportunities, pains, and thus ultimately network. These get-togethers also become spaces where people discuss feedback in a non-threatening environment.

All in all, virtual coffees help team members maintain team connections even when they're not physically in the same physical location, and because of their flexibility, they are what people need them to be in the moment: to grow, to explore opportunity, to learn, and, of course, to chill.

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Automate casual, virtual meetups in chat

An intentional virtual coffee (or tea, or your preferred drink) includes low-fidelity activities like talking and brainstorming.

Set aside some time with your peers. It restores your energy and create engagement.

Type @DailyBot virtual coffee to participate in weekly matches for 1-1s and casual conversations.

1. Participants of the weekly virtual coffee must all opt-in using "virtual coffee on".
2. The pairing starts on Mondays. On this day, every participant will receive a message confirming their participation. The bot will give the user the opportunity to opt-out for that week in one click, or do nothing and carry on with that weekly virtual coffee.
3. Participants have Monday through Wednesday, 5:59pm to opt-out.
4. On Wednesday at 6:00pm, the bot will announce that week's matches to all participants through a private message between the matches (usually 2, sometimes 3 people)
5. Users have the rest of the week to schedule their 1:1 meetings and connect. On Sundays, the system will reboot itself and get ready for new invites next Monday morning.

Virtual Coffee help

Try this command to see the complete list of commands for the virtual coffee.

virtual coffee on: to activate weekly virtual coffees.
virtual coffee off: to deactivate weekly virtual coffees.
virtual coffee match: to see who’s your current weekly match.
virtual coffee skip: to skip your match for the week.
virtual coffee unskip: before Wednesday if you've changed your mind and want to be re-matched this week.
virtual coffee block @user: to block a user.
virtual coffee unblock @user: to unblock a user.
virtual coffee blocked list: to see your list of blocked users.

FAQs

• At the moment the date/time is fixed, so, no, it's not possible to change the time of the match, or the day when it occurs.
• Participants are matched automatically every week, unless they opt out within the grace period (Mon - Wed 6pm) using the "skip" command or the button below every weekly invitation.

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