Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, as my human interaction is at a minimum (to put it lightly): small talk is hard. Even more so when you’re working remotely—my colleague Jusin wrote an entire article about it.

The hardest part for me is wanting to help keep morale up for my team but feeling super awkward being like, “hey everyone, let’s talk about...uh, something!” 

One thing we do at Zapier is let robots do the awkward parts for us. For example, every Friday, a bot sends our #marketing Slack channel a message with a Friday “watercooler” question. 

That gets everyone chatting without anyone having to awkwardly ask people what they wanted to be when they grew up. Much less weird coming from a robot, we think.

If you’re itching for human interaction but don’t want to be the person who starts randomly asking about international weather patterns, try some of the automation suggestions I outlined in this article.

Build culture in your remote team with automation

What did we miss? How else can the robots help us be more human? Let me know if you have any ideas.