Once a month we get our company together for an hour-long Lunch and Learn. When we moved to a distributed environment, we knew we had to find ways to adapt to the lack of water cooler conversations, overhearing, and general knowledge sharing.
The purpose of the Lunch and Learn sessions is to find out what other teams are working on and increase cross-team collaboration and communication.
Once a quarter, each team presents something they are proud of accomplishing, a lesson learned, a cross-functional win, and something coming up that they are excited about – in four minutes or less!
During the ‘in between’ months, we use a platform called Gatheround to help facilitate discussion prompts ranging from What virtual tool do you think is most effective to How did you unplug and unwind this month? Connections are built and lots of fun is had! And there is an incredible fade-out feature when the activity ends. Definitely our Freeoskers favorite part of Gatheround.
We have seen great benefit to our monthly lunch and learns. Last month a team discovered an opportunity to leverage their functional expertise to make life more effective for another. They sat down for a few hours and utilized technology to improve a process.
Our ways of working continue to evolve but finding ways to connect with fellow Freeoskers will always be a top priority.
