Unlock the potential of virtual interactions
Step outside your comfort zones and embrace diverse perspectives. Broaden your horizon, challenge preconceptions, and cultivate inclusivity..
Get equipped with a range of conversation formats for nurturing personal relationships and fostering professional growth.
Order NOW end embark on an adventure of connection and discovery.
What can you achieve with this book?
This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to enhancing their virtual coffee experiences. By embracing the book’s 52 formats, readers can overcome the limitations of physical distance and connect with people worldwide, fostering a global sense of community.
The book emphasises moving beyond transactional interactions and embracing vulnerability and authenticity. It encourages readers to delve deeper into conversations, fostering personal growth and empathy through a better understanding of oneself and others.
The book also focuses on enhancing communication skills.
Through effective listening, insightful questioning, and clear articulation, readers can become more confident and persuasive communicators in all aspects of life, with the formats provided in the book serving as valuable tools for daily practice.
Bonding
Virtual coffee formats in the theme ‘Bonding’ provide uncomplicated and pleasant virtual coffees. The formats allow team members to stay within their own comfort zone when it comes to sharing details of their personal lives. These work in teams where members need to get to know each other better.
Fun
Need to bring some energy and fun into the team meetings? Get inspired by the formats in this category. Some virtual coffees involve physical activity, others will have you bursting into fits laughter. Whatever it takes for a vibrant virtual team meeting.
Opening up
Up close and personal for next level bonding as a team. The virtual coffee formats in this category reveal a lot about the personalities and experiences of you and your fellow team members.
Welcome and goodbye
The ‘Welcome and Goodbye’ virtual coffees are all designed to welcome a new team member in a way that actually helps to remember something about your new colleagues when introduced to them all at once. And when a colleague is leaving the team you will find appropriate waving goodbye templates in this category.
Get your copy and start your experience!
Order NOW end embark on an adventure of connection and discovery.
The team behind the book
We are all Agile enthusiasts. We are engaged in building coherent teams.
This passion didn’t change when COVID forced us to work from home, but it did challenge us and make us come up with new ways to interact as teams. That formed the basis for our book “Virtual Coffees – 52 Formats for Meaningful Connections in Teams”.
In a world where physical proximity is not always feasible, virtual coffees become a bridge to forge meaningful connections. Using this book, readers can start a journey of exploration, growth, and genuine connection.
The Virtual Coffee foundation
Our purpose
At our core, we are driven by a mission to foster effective collaboration, enjoyment, and engagement within virtual teams. We achieve this by encouraging, supporting, and sharing practices, ideas, and insights that informally empower teams.
Research has underscored the significance of cultivating a friendly and safe team environment. Such an environment encourages active engagement and smooth collaboration.
Our commitment is to provide the tools and knowledge needed to adapt, grow, and thrive within the evolving landscape of virtual team collaboration.
Our Products & Services
In addition to offering our book, we provide a range of products and services
aimed at empowering individuals and teams:
- Educational Programs: training, lectures, and workshops to enhance your skills and knowledge.
- Ambassador Collaborations: we work with ambassadors who
share our mission, amplifying our reach and impact. - Knowledge Sharing: our commitment to knowledge sharing through a wealth of resources and insights.
- Research Initiatives: inform you of our practices and contribute to the understanding of our field.
- Promotional Support: promoting awareness of our mission and values
Arno Delhij
Bob Kastje
Fried Broekhof
Anette Heijink
Annemarie Koelewijn-den Heijer
Virtual Coffee news
Promoting psychological safety in virtual teams
Psychological safety is one of the corner stones for successful teams as Amy C. Edmondson has advocated in her foundational book “the fearless organization.” A virtual team in this respect team is no different than a team that is co-located. The challenges however for a virtual team to build psychological safety are different. So how then to enhance a psychological safe environment in a team that is dispersed across several locations around the globe?
Psychological safety refers to the perception that one can speak up, take interpersonal risks, and share ideas without the fear of negative consequences. In general, the key elements from Edmondson’s work on how to promote psychological safety are:
- Framing the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem
- Acknowledging one’s own fallibility
- Modelling curiosity and asking lots of questions.
In a virtual team the challenges for successful collaboration are multiple. Next to the more obvious technical ones like having the right tooling and well-functioning connections and the logistics of differing time zones, there is the lack of physical proximity. People working together from the ends of a glass fibre line, are missing all the opportunities of being able to read the full body language when something is said (or not), discussing a topic while getting a coffee at the machine and so on. This does something to the ability to bond as a team and with that to psychological safety.
So, to promote and foster psychological safety in virtual teams, the challenge is to bring the people closer together that might be thousands of miles away from each other. How to do that?
The power of Virtual Coffees
One of the key elements is getting acquainted on a deeper personal level by having meaningful conversations and exchanging personal information that is surpassing the mere daily chat (however important this is.) It will lead to more empathy and growing mutual understanding amongst the team members and lessens the risk of misconceiving each other’s intention and behaviour.
The crux in building these deeper personal bonds is to reserve some time for it in a regular fashion. It doesn’t need long conversations. Shorter but regular ones are more effective. Depending on the context of the team, you might want to build it up slowly. Do not jump straight away into the traumas experienced during childhood. This approach could be the perfect recipe for killing all appetite to do this another time…
Take it slowly, do it regularly, use different formats and have it prepared and facilitated. And then, just do it, learn and build the psychological safety in your team. It might even forge a bond between people that well outlives the actual existence of the team…
This is what we call Virtual Coffees. We have been there, done it. It helped us survive as a team of agile coaches during the Covid crisis. It helped us even to write a book about it while we were no longer direct colleagues: “The Virtual Coffee Experience. 52 formats for meaningful connections in teams.”
Successful book launch
Thursday November 16th, we’ve finally launched our book with almost all authors present. Proud feelings and happiness radiated from the stage. Marëlle Roozemond handed the very first book to Maya Leibman of America Airlines. Enjoy reading and using the book and the virtual coffee formats in your teams,
Maya Leibman -American Airlines- receives first copy of Virtual Coffee Experence at Agile Consortium Jaarcongres 2023
We’ve received great feedback of Maya both on stage as via a post on LinkedIn. May Leibman wrote:
” I was extremely honored to receive the first copy of the book “The Virtual Coffee Experience” when I spoke yesterday at the Agile Consortium conference. I want to thank Marielle Roozemond and all the authors of the Virtual Coffee Foundation and commend them for coming together during COVID, connecting with one another, building trust, and furthering the mission of Agile. COVID was not an easy time for anyone but they not only made the best of it, they realized they had created something special and now want to share their learnings with the world which as we all know, is the highest form of Agile maturity! I’ve already started reading the book and it’s terrific – filled with practical advice and tips that virtual and hybrid teams can put into use immediately. It’s easy and fun to read and I have no doubt that teams who utilize these ideas will develop stronger bonds, relationships, trust, and performance.”
The first books
Yes, here are the first books! Annette Heijink en Annemarie Koelewijn were the lucky two authors (and board members of the Virtual Coffee Foundation) to open a box and find the first two books of ‘The Virtual Coffee Experience’. Just in time for tomorrow’s book launch in Doorn NL at the Agile Consortium Year Conference.
The other 11 authors of the book: Arno Delhij 웃 , Bob Kastje , Catharina Adriaans, Derk-Jan de Grood , Elgert Verhoef , Fried Broekhof Marcel de Groot , Marielle Roozemond , Paul Van Wijk Ronald Schouten , Syed Ameenuddin Syed Niaz , all (former) ING Agile Coaches!
We hope the book will support and inspire many teams and organizations in building and improving their virtual connections!
Keep an eye on this page the upcoming days and weeks for inspiring activities.
Get in touch
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