The Water Cooler as a Strategic Collaboration Tool

[Note: This is a bloggy written version of a talk I gave in November 2016 at KMWorld's annual knowledge management conference in Washington D.C. If you happen to be reading this before December 15, 2016, it will also be the topic of discussion for the weekly #esnchat on Twitter. If you are reading this after December 15, you should still check out #esnchat every Thursday 2-3 pm Eastern time. There's always a lively, informative discussion about some topic related to enterprise social networks.]

What is it about drinking and social interactions? We've been linking them together since before we were humans. Bars and pubs are "watering holes." Conversations in cafes and coffee houses have helped fuel innovation. Even plain old water will do the trick -- just check out the origin of "scuttlebutt" as an example.

So it's no surprise that in modern times, the water cooler became the go-to metaphor for the place where employees gather to share information informally. When I tried using Google's Ngram Viewer (which displays the frequency at which words and phrases appear in books) to get a sense of how far back the idea of a water cooler goes, I discovered this interesting curve:

The "inverted bottle" water cooler has been around since the mid-19th century, but it was originally cooled using a block of ice. It wasn't until the 1930s and the invention of the electrically refrigerated water cooler that it became a staple of offices everywhere. So you can see the sharp peak in appearances of the phrase just after its invention and the gradual decline as the novelty wore off.

So what caused the second spike in interest? Well as it turns out, the modern cubicle was invented in 1967. Suddenly employees needed a way to take a break away from the dull confines of their workspace, and the water cooler became just the place to do it. It wasn't long before the phrase "water cooler" had just as much if not more of a social connotation than a literal one. In fact, by 2009 there was both an article and a book (by different authors) titled The Water Cooler Effect. In the article, the author (MIT Media Lab director Sandy Pentland) says (emphasis mine):

We are all social animals and our connection with others at a local level - our tribe - is vitally important. With increased cohesion likely comes an increase in things such as shared tacit knowledge, shared attitudes and work habits, and social support. This happens through office chat about how to manage specific situations, people, and problems, sharing tips, talking about life-work balance, and so forth. In other words, much of the important information about how to be successful and productive at a job is not going to be found in a memo or an employee handbook, but rather around the water cooler.

Interestingly, 2009 was right around the time that enterprise social networks began to take off, so it was only natural that some ESN deployments might feature a "digital water cooler" where employees could talk about anything at all, whether business related or not. Over the ensuing years, some companies have embraced this idea while others fear it or see it as a time-waster. I would argue that the digital water cooler is not only non-threatening but can actually become a strategic asset for your organization.

My company has had an ESN for almost five years and we have included a digital water cooler since the very first day. From my experience, I believe that the fear some organizations have comes from taking the "water cooler" metaphor too literally. When employees gather around a real physical water cooler, the conversation is usually one of three types: gossip and office politics, jokes and casual conversation, or sharing of ideas. But watch what happens when you transfer those behaviors to a digital environment visible to everyone in the company:

• Gossip largely disappears. The whole idea of gossip is that it's secret, so no one is going to gossip about co-workers on an open platform that everyone else can see.
• Fun "goofing off" kinds of posts settle to the level of the organization at large. If you have a fun-loving culture, you will have a fun water cooler. If you work in a more conservative environment, you will have a water cooler with a higher percentage of serious posts. Again, most employees are well aware of the high visibility of the water cooler and will tailor their posts appropriately.
• Ideas can actually be amplified and enhanced when shared in the water cooler because of the large, diverse audience viewing them. They're an invitation for others to contribute who might not have otherwise known those ideas were even being discussed. I'll dig into this in detail below.

In my company (which is a global company with about 12,000 employees), we have around 25% of our employees visiting the water cooler every month. I've identified five ways that the digital water cooler has worked as a strategic asset for us and can for you too:

1. As a training ground for the ESN. This is the benefit most commonly argued by collaboration software vendors. A water cooler is a safe, low-risk space for employees to learn how to post, respond, upload files, embed images and videos, etc. In other words, it's an easy, fun way to become familiar with all the features of the ESN software that will make them more productive in other situations.
2. As a representative sample of the overall employee population. I've examined our water cooler demographics by business area and by geography and found that it tracks pretty closely to the overall employee population. This means that if you post a poll or survey in the water cooler, you're pretty sure of getting responses that represent a reasonably accurate distribution of employees. It's also a great place to ask questions when you don't have a specific person to ask -- you know, the kind that start "Does anybody know ... ?" They're what Andrew McAfee called Enterprise Q&A, the kinds of questions that ESNs were made for. Given that the water cooler audience is essentially a mini-company, it's statistically the best shot you have within your organization of pulling together a group of people with the ability to answer any possible question.
3. As a cross-pollinator of ideas. This follows directly from the representative sample benefit above. Here's an example: We had a product development team who had five different ideas for how to design a new feature customers were requesting. The different methods all had their own cost, reliability, serviceability, and customer satisfaction implications. Instead of taking the traditional route and deciding among themselves which approach to take, they threw the problem into the Water Cooler for anyone to discuss. In less than two days they had over 40 responses from 17 people spanning 3 countries and 5 business functions, and the end result was actually a solution the team hadn't considered -- basically a hybrid of two of their initial ideas.
4. As a categorizer and classifier. If you analyze the posts in your water cooler for patterns, you may discover topics of interest that warrant their own specific collaboration spaces. For example, we noticed that (1) many posts were pointers to new technologies that might be worth having our R&D teams explore, and (2) employees often posted questions about issues that were keeping them from getting their jobs done. "I'm changing offices -- who do I talk to about transferring my phone number?" "The conference room projector isn't working -- who do I call?" "I need help with Excel!" In the first case we created a new collaboration space specifically for technology discussions and promoted it with all our top technical people. In the second we created a space specifically for asking those types of productivity questions and had employees from HR, IT and Facilities (the business areas most likely to be able to answer them) assigned to monitor it. This not only ensures that the questions get answered in a timely manner but also highlights areas for improvement in how we categorize and display information so that these questions don't get asked in the first place. By allowing these categories to emerge organically rather that trying to define them top-down, we were able to instantly have audiences in those spaces of 500-1,000 employees and sustain them over time.
5. As an amplifier of ideas and conversations. Our particular ESN software (Jive) recently added the ability to share content between places as well as between people. When a blog post, document, or discussion is shared with a place, it will appear as if it is in that place. However it is really only a link, and clicking on it will take the user to the place where the actual content exists. Prior to this feature, many employees faced a dilemma: Do I post to a niche collaboration space which is the logical place for my topic even though it has a small audience, or do I post to the Water Cooler in order to get the big audience even though it is a general purpose, anything goes kind of place? Increasingly, our teams are now finding that if they post to their specialty space and share to the Water Cooler, they get the best of both worlds -- a well organized space with valuable content as well as a large audience to see it. Not to mention that click-throughs will drive that audience to the smaller topical space where they might discover even more related content.

A digital water cooler isn't just a playground or something to be feared, but a collaboration tool to be embraced, managed, and leveraged as a strategic asset. It can be a laboratory that reflects the moods and interests of employees, and an early warning system for emerging topics that may need to be emphasized. Its openness and "anything goes" atmosphere is a strength, not a weakness, because that combination of fun and serious discussions on any topic under the sun is exactly what is necessary, and quite possibly the only way to create a sustained, always available audience that truly reflects the diversity of your organization. Have a drink!