Absolutely! I started a scheduled call for a weekly "monorepo morning tea" for people interested in the mechanics of our monorepo and how we build/version/distribute software in-house. No agenda, no commitment, the meeting link is posted weekly via a Slack reminder to a public channel. It gets a couple of folks from our build farm team, a couple of people who are experts in specific languages/runtimes (Python, Node, etc.), a couple of SREs, a couple of random developers across the company who find this stuff interesting, etc. The topics tend to be pretty wide-ranging but it's a good way to find people doing interesting and relevant work that you might not ordinarily think of talking to and hear what's on their minds.
Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work pretty well.
If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other. They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know each other anyway.
Can you tool-in a water coolier on a different floor, a different building, or a different city? Because that’s the communication that has to happen at any large company. Very peopleiwork witharein my for now official office even if I went there.
Also, my company already had (before the pandemic) a voluntary program to match with random coworkers to get lunch, specifically to facilitate this sort of thing, and that's been turned into online coffee chats. Seems to work pretty well.
If you value these serendipitous interactions as part of your company culture, then it behooves you to properly support and encourage them. You can't just set off a weird smell and let the two coworkers who feel like speaking up meet each other. They're probably the least shy people on the floor and know each other anyway.