Spark conversations in Slack with this simple reminder

There are a TON of Slack apps for sparking conversations, building culture and improve connection in a remote team.

Don’t get me wrong, many of them are really great at what they do!

… but like with everything else, it’s usually best to start out small to see what works for you before you dive into an expensive purchase.

This simple Slack reminder is what most teams need. And it’s free!

In a remote team, a lot of discussions are centered around the work.

Talking about work is important!

But if you care about getting quality work out the door, people need to collaborate.

And to collaborate well, you need to know a little about the humans you’re working with.

Which means getting to know a little about who they are outside of work.

Here’s how I usually introduce the concept.

(Feel free to copy and edit any part of it)

Hey hey 👋

I worked at a place a few years ago that went remote and people split up into multiple teams, both at the same time.

Because of that we had to come up with solutions to things we felt we were missing in the new setup.The main thing was that we lost touch of each other and conversations became primarily focused on work.

Efficient! But also quite boring. 🤷‍♂️

Our solution was to have a simple recurring question that was posted in a Slack channel with the text “Anything special happened this weekend?”And people wrote big or small things like:

“I got married”

… or …

“I had a lovely kebab salad at ‘Linköpings finest’; Kebab Baren. Took me back to my teenage years in Linköping”

It sparked a lot of interesting conversations.

The best thing was that when we all met IRL, we knew a lot more about each other and conversations flowed more naturally because many conversations had already been started.

Something you’d like to try here?

And that’s that!

So many interesting conversations have been sparked by this simple reminder.

How to set up the reminder that sparks the conversations

Here’s the simple reminder we set up in our #random Slack channel that sparks these conversations.

/reminder Anything special happen this weekend? every monday at 9