Yes, I think you could. However this type of interaction (screen sharing) is generally scheduled (stand up, all-staff, etc.) while most institutional learning is done off the cuff. For example, when I was a younger programmer I spent quite a bit of time outside with an older programmer. He would go outside to smoke and I would go outside to take a break. We talked a lot and I learned a ton of stuff on those smoke breaks.
At another job, long ago, we had a free soda machine on the first floor. So, every day around 2:00 several of us would get together, walk downstairs, grab a soda and talk about stuff. It was a great bonding experience and allowed us to become much closer as a team.
We've been trying to recreate these "water cooler" experiences with Zoom and screen sharing but haven't had much success. Everything feels forced. We have a daily "hangout" meeting; no one is forced to attend and most people don't. I've been trying to get management to have a 2-day on-site event every quarter but it hasn't worked out. We used to do a quarterly on-site event in the before times (pre COVID) but not anymore. Ironically, before COVID most of our employees were local and in-office and we still had on-site events for everyone.
Perspective from someone who entered the workforce during COVID, I found being onboarded remotely was just fine. My team lead is 27, and the rest of us are under 25. We bond and engage socially in our Slack channels just fine. We meet once a week, but banter less than over text.
I don’t mean this in a flippant way - for better or worse, social media has transformed the way this generation communicates. Online slang is an adaptation that evolved as a means to capture the full range of human expression in character limited unicode strings. Group chats are the atomic unit of social networks in the digital age.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a generational divide when it comes to how efficient remote work and learning is, and the success will vary from team to team depending on its composition. The latter is self evident enough, but still useful to keep in mind.
Personally, I find there’s an argument to be made that water cooler experiences are forced, since it’s synchronous communication that makes it less possible for a party to politely disengage midway through if that’s what they wish.
yeah zoom based hangouts are usually pretty cringe and I don't enjoy most myself. have felt similarly to you that on sites are really the only consistent way this kind of stuff happens, but it's been hard in my company to motivate management to pay for those
