🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

How often do you meet people by chance in a virtual environment?

💡 Concept

Ah, serendipity: “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” It’s what makes life exciting, and it’s also one of the main reasons why so many executives believe working in the office is better than working remotely. In an office, they claim, you have opportunities to connect organically with colleagues, even those you don’t directly work with. And that, apparently, is where the magic happens!

But these “chance” encounters aren’t 100% driven by chance. They’re enabled by structure: you're in the office together, working with others in real time, regularly convening to accomplish the same goals. When you look at it that way, there’s no real reason you can’t create similar structures to enable serendipity online. It just takes a little intentionality.

To meet and connect with more people by chance, you have to put yourself in situations where that’s possible. In a remote or hybrid team, that could mean

• interest groups on Slack

• cross-functional meetings

• virtual networking events

• trainings, synchronous or asynchronous, internal and external

• LinkedIn groups

• virtual conferences

If nothing exists in your organization that allows you to meet anyone outside of your direct working group, create those opportunities if you have the autonomy to do so. For instance, if you’d like to connect with more people from different functions, you can schedule monthly lunch-and-learn sessions, when individuals give brief presentations on an area of expertise or lead a discussion on a particular topic.

🎬 Take Action

Take the following steps to enable more chance encounters today:

• Identify virtual events that your organization hosts that can provide opportunities for connecting with new people.

• Sign up for a virtual gathering like a networking event or a conference.

• Enable structured random groupings of co-workers to connect using a tool like Donut (which integrates with Slack and Teams).

• Enroll in a cohort-based training.

• Join a LinkedIn group and contribute to a conversation.

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Learn more about how to build social capital across distance with Growplaceless.

📰 News

Looking for an opportunity to meet new people and network with other remote work advocates? Look no further than The Remote Show Live! They meet every month to connect, share stories and learn together. Sign up here!

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.