I was happily working away on a client project when an old friend called me out of the blue. We spoke for about 40 minutes on topics around sales, marketing, customer service and career development. This conversation was interesting and we both shared past experiences that we felt would help each of us respectively.

Later that evening my neighbour, who used to be a high-flying sales executive and now runs his own business invited me over for a chat. We quickly got onto the main hurdles that we were both trying to overcome in our professional lives. He carefully dismantled my challenges and worked through them with me, giving me a different perspective to approach.

These two separate situations gave me inspiration and helped me focus on some points that I had not considered. It just shows you that the simplest of actions can result in really positive outcomes. Much like the effect Coffee Who has on people within companies around the world.

At Coffee Who, we noticed a common problem with modern business, especially larger organisations: staff are being placed under ever increasing pressure to communicate as quickly as possible, which has developed a culture of reactionary “instant digital connectivity“. More and more people seem to overuse or misuse email and instant messaging. We’ve all seen it happen – a member of staff emailing the person sat a few feet away from them, rather than looking up from their computer and asking the question. Our experiences and consultations have found this culture commonplace, and we believe that there is a need to bring business communication back to basics, with more face-to-face interactions and relationship building within organisations.

Face to face vs digital conversation

• When we sit down face-to-face to engage with another human being we have a heightened connection with that person. A digital conversation has no emotion nor does it allow the participants to build a strong relationship.
• Meeting face-to-face also enables us to benefit from non-verbal communications – this is important in building a connection with someone and in developing a broader understanding and more meaningful relationship with colleagues.
• The personal touch. Basically, it is nicer to meet and interact with a person rather than mediating all relationships through a computer screen!

Developing relationships and improving businesses

What are we suggesting then? Well, the simple fact is that if the people within your business meet more people within the business, communication and efficiency will improve. Professional networking is important not only to an individual’s career, but also to the company they work within. Encouraging face-to-face meetings between new people strengthens internal networks leading to improved collaboration, problem solving and staff morale.

There are many other benefits to improved face-to-face communications. For example, whereas an email update or post on your intranet can easily be ignored or forgotten, if you can seed ideas and topics with certain members of your workforce which they discuss with others, then you’ll get a much more organic and meaningful spread of ideas and information.

Coffee Who for Businesses

So, the benefits clear, but how do we bring our people together? We have developed a simple application for exactly this purpose. Coffee Who is an easy to use web application that is aimed at medium and large enterprises. The application works like this:

1. Your staff log in to the application using their company credentials
2. Using the matching engine, the application suggests a colleague that they could meet with for coffee
3. They communicate with easy other via the app and arrange a time and place to meet up
4. They meet with each other, have a discussion and a coffee (or a tea!) – we generally suggest that the company pays for this, as it serves as a nice incentive
5. Once they return to the application they are asked a couple of feedback questions
6. They can arrange to meet someone new

The app’s matching engine allows people to skip colleagues who they might already know.

What else does Coffee Who do?

We work with you to provide support and ensure that the programme is engaging and effective. Our service includes:

• Setup of the application
• Developing feedback questions
• Deploying the programme (inviting your people to use it)
• Provide marketing collateral such as posters, videos and meeting strategies

So, do you want to improve your company’s internal communications?

We are offering a special trial package (until March 31st 2013) which includes the following:

• Three month trial programme
• Up to 500 active users
• Unlimited rounds (meetings)
• Unlimited feedback questions
• Email notifications
• Exportable data for analysis offline
• Secure cloud hosting
• Analytics on who is using the application
• Support from a Coffee Who account manager
• Marketing collateral for launch

Contact us to get your account setup and find out about pricing.

Plus, we are so confident that you will appreciate Coffee Who, that we provide a 100% money back guarantee for the first 30 days if you are not satisfied with how the programme is working out.

Contact us on +44 20 7112 8859 or email comms@coffeewho.com

Here are 5 positive outcomes from adopting the CoffeeWho to help introduce new team members:

1. Meeting someone completely new that you may now have met throughout your normal working day. This is great for developing the family feeling throughout the business.

2. By talking to someone different within your company will almost certainly mean you learn something new. Likewise they will probably learn something from you too. I think this could be referred to as professional growth.

3. Everyone has problems, issues and stuff to deal with that they could use some help. Just by listening to your new connection you may be helping them with a problem. It could be a simple technical solution or a complex project around corporate social responsibility, that depends of what the two of you do for work.

4. Making new connections is building your professional and personal network. The person from the marketing team that you met last month might just be the contact you need to help you push that new sales initiative.

5. Finally, it makes working life a little more Fun. You’ll probably find that you have more social occasions that you and your new found colleagues can meet introduce other people.

Whether you are the Managing Director, Human Resources Executive or work on the shop floor, you will all benefit from these outcomes. If you would like to find out more about CoffeeWho and how it could help your business please get in touch.