Recently a couple of us started a culture hack called Coffee Buddies in our department and it’s been amazing to see how it’s progressed and the connections that have been made from it.

What is Coffee Buddies?

It’s a low tech way to do internal networking within your company, and an opportunity to learn something new or about someone you work with. Be it in another team, tribe, department or building.

How have we got it rolling?

Two of us (Jenny and I) started by having a coffee to discuss how we could get coffee buddies going, following seeing a similar idea being run at Car Sales.

We decided to setup a simple wall with three lanes:

• Coffee Lovers – the backlog of people that would like to meet others over a beverage.
• Having Coffee – the catch ups that are in progress.
• Had Coffee – the number of connections people had made.

After our coffee we setup the wall in an area that has a lot of foot traffic in our building (see the photo below) and invited a couple of people to join.

The following week we formally launched Coffee Buddies at our weekly department wide stand up. We asked people if they were interested in meeting others to place their name on an index card and place it on the wall (under Coffee Lovers).  We also explained that if you wanted to meet someone to pull your card and theirs into the “Having Coffee” lane and send them a invite to catch up. Then after your catch up to come back to the wall and tick the connection off under “Had Coffee” and place their cards back under the “Coffee Lovers” lane.

How is it ?

In just over 2 months we’ve had over 40 coffee connections and more an more people joining every week. This culture hack has also been a really awesome enabler to learn more about the people you work with and what interests they have outside of work.