The Coda Connection

Inspiration

Socializing at work helps build social capital, inspires collaboration, makes for happy and more productive workers. With people no longer working in the same place and having chance interactions with one another, organizations are finding ways for employees to build social connections in the workplace. This is the inspiration for building The Coda Connection, a social intranet that invites employees to interact and get to know one another through various social communities of interest.

What it does

This business communication tool designed for team collaboration doubles as a platform for encouraging employees to:

share knowledge and interests
easily connect and exchange
organize both virtual and in-person gatherings
take a social break
get involved in company activities

Check it out at link

On our intranet, you can celebrate the holidays with fellow coworkers. For Halloween, you can vote for your favorite pet costume within a specified timeframe and even submit your own entry. During the winter, you can create and share a holiday card with a warm greeting.

If you're interested in wellness offerings, you can come here to do some meditation and breathing exercises, view sample ways to stretch at your desk, read articles, and access company perks.

HR also put out a step challenge where you can have some friendly competition for who can walk the walk.

The company also prides itself on defraying the cost for a self-organized group of 12 to run the Ragnar Relay. We have a page that serves as a template for future organizers to use by adding on to existing content, like the FAQ for the Runner Onboarding Document, or modifying existing content. You can add all team contacts and below you can see what correspondences have been sent in past. You can then modify prior email message templates, put in who you want to send the message to, and then click on this red button here to email it to those tagged. One email template includes a link to fill out a form so that the team captain can understand the team's preferences for opting to pay for lodging or know what snacks to buy for the trip. There's also a 30-day running schedule for beginners where they can check off done for each day they complete a challenge. Additionally, there is a fun recap of the organized outing, using pulses to allow people to capture how they're feeling in the moment and seeing an ongoing transcript of the day along with a fun word cloud from all entries captured.

Under the Events and Meetup's page, people can recommend restaurants in the area to explore or they can ask and see if anyone else wants to get together for a casual gathering

If you're looking to play an impromptu game via Zoom, you can come here, create a meeting, add yourself as a player to guess the correct word, and win points to add to the leaderboard. Reach 5 points and you become the winner in this particular game.

How we built it

We built our project with Coda's all-in-one document and leveraged Coda's API.

What's next for The Coda Connection

We could build some of the different components in numerous documents separately and integrate them into the social intranet. There could be some consideration in designing this intranet in a decentralized way so that it's truly built from the ground up, based on the culture an organization wants to cultivate.