Five ways to foster team culture and community with Google Chat

Google Chat is a great tool for teams to stay connected and productive, with support for real-time messaging, scaled collaboration and rich personal expression. These features also make Chat a powerful way to build culture and community. Here are five ways Workspace customers use Chat to foster meaningful connection in their teams, workgroups, and across their organizations.

1. Create a virtual water cooler

Give your team a place to catch up and reconnect anytime with a team space where folks can say hi, share a quick update, post a fun article or meme, or just share whatever’s top of mind. Some Chat customers post a question of the day to keep the conversation going. Share a fun image from Giphy or ask a question with Absolute Poll to get the conversation started. You can automatically add new team members to the space using Google Groups, while threads in spaces keep the conversations organized.

2. Make announcements to connect leaders with team members

As organizations grow, it’s essential that leaders find effective ways to share important news and updates with every team member. Announcements in Chat are a powerful way to support this sort of communication at scale. Only designated space managers can post messages, while team members can react with emojis or reply using in-line threading. Replies can also be disabled when necessary. 

Announcements can also be a useful enhancement for all-team meetings, allowing leaders to share resources and foster post-event discussions. Spaces currently support up to 50,000 members, and will soon support up to 500,000 users, making it possible to manage communications for large events in a single location. Message views allow leaders to see how many users have viewed individual messages.

3.  Connect around a shared interest

One of the best ways to build community is to bring together groups with common interests. Google Chat makes this easy, with the ability to create and share spaces organized around a topic of personal interest, such as travel, cooking, pets, cycling, or just about anything else. You can add members within the space, share the link to the space with others, and make your space easy to find by browsing for spaces in Chat or searching in Gmail. By default, spaces are discoverable to anyone in your organization and users can easily browse or search for spaces available for them to join. 

4. Foster healthy, inclusive conversations

Active moderation is especially important for larger, open communities. Make sure to define clear guidelines for participation and identify a team of designated moderators to keep the conversation positive and on-track. Moderation tools in spaces allow community members to flag messages for review by anyone assigned a moderator role by the space manager.  

5. Recognize and motivate employees 

Employee engagement apps built for Google Chat, such as Achievers, Bonusly, Amber and Bsharp Celebrate, provide a way to recognize and reward great work, both peer-to-peer and leader-to-team. Sharing the recognition in a team space lets everyone take part in the good news. 

Google Chat is a dynamic platform for building large communities and nurturing a positive organizational culture, whether it’s through virtual water coolers, discussion forums on shared interests, supporting organizational announcements, or creating a hub for recognizing employee contributions. Embrace these features to create a vibrant and connected workplace where teams thrive and contribute to the overall success of your organization.

Ready to try Chat? Here’s how to get started. Or catch up on our recent blogs: 

• Express yourself in Google Chat 

• Five powerful ways to find what you’re looking for in Google Chat

• Staying focused on what matters most with Google Chat.