Never underestimate the power of a banter chat room that people just … talk… in. About anything, everything. Random protesting, etc.

One of my previous companies talked so much in the random channel we had a second one made with our name on it (literally).

And I feel like our team had better cohesion and got a whole lot of work done, in part due to it.

Being okay with talking to your coworkers about nothing makes it easier to talk to them about something, at least in my experience, and every company I’ve worked at that had that.

Further, at companies that DIDN’T behave that way (sample size one), talking to coworkers about anything and or nothing was a HUGE, stressful chore that always felt like a problem and like I was stepping on people’s time.