April 09, 2021 Icebreaker: A bot to fortify team culture Introduction Imagine a bot programmed for building connections that pairs you up with a person in your organization you have never met and organizes a meet-up to foster camaraderie. This is what the Icebreaker bot does! In organizations where everyone is working towards a common goal, it is imperative for employees to know and support each other. Purposeful interactions facilitate sharing of interests, ideas, and knowledge which directly impacts the company’s bottom line. On the other side, the big shift to remote work has made it more challenging for organizations to cultivate a winning culture among dispersed teams. So, how do you ensure that your employees and teams share a great bond without in-person interactions? What is the Icebreaker app/bot? Business owners understand that an environment of seclusion is unhealthy for teams where any communication gap can affect the entire organization negatively. Hence, you must create opportunities to maintain cohesion among employees and unify dysfunctional workspaces, if any, to let culture evolve organically. To help you make better connections and elevate teamwork, we present to you the Icebreaker bot. The Icebreaker bot helps the members of an organization get closer by pairing them up every week at random. The bot does the heavy lifting of finding a new person to meet with each week, as well as suggests times when both the members are free to meet. Members can choose whether they want to interact casually or share knowledge and valuable experience with new people. Features Now, let’s talk about some interesting features offered by the Icebreaker bot– Get paired with new hires or with people who share the same titles as you and exchange work or ideas to make the meeting more fruitful.Sign up as a mentor or mentee to connect with people instantly for professional conversations based on your areas of interest. Nudge people for taking a break, meet for coffee, or a walk around the block.Chat or set a meeting once you find your matched pair.Set a preference to let people know about your availability.Post-meeting follow-up to collect your reviews on past meetings.A leaderboard ranks team members by the number of meetups they’ve completed. Summary An atmosphere of oneness, and trust must continue even if teams are collaborating virtually. Secondly, employees accumulate distinct company knowledge over time which must pass on. Also, it’s a two-way learning process where senior employees can share crucial insights from their experience, juniors may offer fresh perspectives on finding solutions. Therefore, nurturing internal relationships is essential for team building and strengthening the company culture. As such, the Icebreaker bot designed for cultivating interest-based communities within your organization facilitates the organic cross-pollination of ideas and best practices. Use the Icebreaker bot to help employees learn more about each other and assimilate better in the new environment. The Icebreaker application is a Microsoft Teams personal app which we, at Cyclotron, can deploy at an organization or personal level. To know more about us, visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com