Whatever your situation, if you didn’t have one already in place, you probably now use some kind of internal chat system to communicate with coworkers without dialing on a phone all the time. Slack, Zoom Chat, MS Teams, Zapier, etc. 

We use Zoom, but I’m not here to talk about the service. I’m curious about your implementation. More along the lines of policies regarding non-work chatter. Do you have dedicated channels for more “fun talk”?

Most people I talk to have answered in the affirmative to this question. We did at my previous job. We do at my current one. The expectation, of course, is that you don’t go nuts and you still get your work done. They can see everything you type and all messages are saved.

But, being remote 100% of the time means you don’t have the same opportunities to truly get to know your coworkers like you do in an office. To counter this, many companies allow personal interaction in chats so you can GTK each other. 

I belong to several fun channels at my job now. Movies & TV, music, books, Harry Potter, recipe sharing, and my personal fave “Spooky Bugs” for people who love Halloween, horror movies, etc. 

But I was looking through an internal knowledge base today at the master list of all the available channels and discovered one for fantasy football!

What what??? I haven’t been able to play FF in four years since leaving my government job. That was where I was part of an annual league. My last job did weekly pick em challenges where you just picked a few teams each week to win their real games. FF was of zero interest there. 

But now? Now I get to manage my own team again!

[image courtesy of Klamath Herald and News]

Oh heck yes! I’ve missed it so much.