In march we missed the Sound Of Colleagues. Shortly after that we started missing those unscheduled meetings. The people you bump into by the coffee machine that you could bounce an idea off. A forum for showing cute pictures of your dogs. Things like that, that just doesn’t happen in a time of back to back, agenda driven and productive meetings.
So we got to work, and quickly prototyped a Slack App to help with this. Hello Bump Into Colleagues.
Every Tuesday at 09.01 AM the app will check who’s online. The app then groups all these people into group of 3–4 people and sends them a DM with a link to a video chat. The directions in the DM is to talk about something unrelated to work for 10 minutes, and the bot even gives a few random topics on open subjects, such as:
- A song you hate that you love
- What’s the meaning of it all
- Something I wish i was good at
We’ve been running this sad piece of sketch code for a couple of months now and have found that our culture (that’s everything that happens between the lines at a company) benefits greatly from this. So we’re opening it up for everyone!
The code itself is nothing we want to be associated with, but it represents what I personally believe in. Since it’s impossible to know if something FEELS interesting before testing it out, we need to build it (poorly) first. No need to put in weeks of dev time to build something that scales at this stage, just use a sketchy language that can get something up quickly.
Feel free to download the code and run it in your own organisation. Or just rewrite it in your favorite language for your needs. And write us a line if you found it useful.
https://github.com/Familjen-Sthlm/bump-into-colleagues
Update: We later used this concept for a client, promoting office spaces in Stockholm. Look here (Swedish).
/Peder