Meet N' Three: Custom Socialization Perk

PHASE 1: In-Person Meet N' Threes

In October 2017, IDEO acquired Datascope, a data science firm. We added 18 data scientists to our Chicago studio overnight and had ambitious plans to hire 30 more designers in the next 6 to 12 months. With so many newbies wandering around, and more joining our ranks every week, it was becoming hard for everyone to meet and connect.

With any new challenge comes new opportunities. As a Workplace Experience Director, I saw one for us to revive and redesign a 1:1 lunch benefit that had become severely underutilized. I enlisted the help of two data scientists, Jane Zanzig and Lisa Nash, and a leadership coordinator, Biz Wells.

The original lunch perk set up any two IDEOers who didn't work together normally to go out to lunch on the studio’s dime once a month. The idea was to help forge new connections, but busy colleagues would often cancel plans and the task of scheduling (and rescheduling) always fell to Biz. The intention of the perk was good, but the time and effort it took to run it meant it never had the impact it was meant to.

Our mission was to use data science to (mostly) automate the scheduling process so that newbies and veterans alike could easily participate in the program. The tool would need to assign “optimal” groups of ChIDEOers, search their calendars for a mutually agreeable time, and send them an invitation to go to lunch together. Here’s how we did it.

We started by asking a seemingly simple question: What makes a good group? I suggested we create groups of three, rather than two, based on social science research that triads are more conducive to sparking creative collaborations and community than dyads. (Dyads can breed gossip and can also feel like awkward work dates if there's a personality mismatch). Triads inspired us to call the new perk “Meet N' Three,” a play on the traditional Southern meal of a protein and three sides. (Okay, technically, that's four items. Well, it made sense at the time...)

Together, we decided that groups should comprise three people whose paths didn't cross day-to-day, while also striking a balance of design disciplines — not all interaction designers or all data scientists, for example. An ideal triad would mix people who were new to the studio with those who had been around longer. With these principles ironed out, Jane and Lisa started building the algorithm.

Next, Jane and Lisa used our intranet to build groups of three. Each group was assigned a score for its “novelty,” which included the number of disciplines represented, the variety of seniority, and the number of projects shared between group members. Using a Monte Carlo approach, the algorithm optimized the score for an entire month’s worth of groups. (In other words, the algorithm created many more groups than needed, and threw away all but those with the highest scores.)

Next up: finding a time for the novel triads to meet. Using Google Calendar's API, the algorithm scraped people's calendars, automatically holding a mutually available time.

Finally, we knew that creating the algorithm was only half the battle. To give the bot some personality, Jonathan Mueller, an illustrator and member of our Workplace Experience team, designed a mascot called "Meety the Meetbot," a friendly humanoid on a mission to bring people together. The newly minted Meetbot scaled easily to accommodate the 45% increase in employees and infused a little data science flavor to boot.

We knew the Meet N' Three perk was a success when selfies of happy triads enjoying the perk started showing up on Slack. Going to a monthly group lunch went from being a burden to a priority, making it easier for newbies to build their social networks and veteran ChIDEOers to strengthen connections with those they didn't cross paths with very often. By the time the pandemic hit a little over three years later, 412 in-person Meet N' Threes had been enjoyed!

PHASE 2: Virtual Meet N' Threes

COVID restrictions quickly a kibosh on IRL Meet N' Threes. But that didn't stop our team — or Meety — from adapting the perk to our now remote and distributed ChIDEO studio. The general gist of the perk — three-person groupings, automatic scheduling via Google Calendar — stayed the same, but because the context was very different, we had to shift the meeting space to Zoom and decided to shorten the duration from 1 hour (a typical lunch break) to 15 minutes outside of standard lunch times (now that people were working from home, they wanted a break to eat away from their computers). The new tweaks worked and soon screenshot selfies of virtual Meet N' Threes started appearing on Slack again. (Small victories!)

Soon, Workplace Experience Directors in our Cambridge and New York offices heard about virtual Meet N' Threes and asked if we could extend the perk to all three offices. Why not, we thought? Zoom had flattened our workplace already so opening up to the perk to another time zone would be easy enough. By August 2020, Meety had expanded his designer pool, creating 128 Virtual Meet N' Threes that (re)connected 221 IDEOers!

Meety's final iteration was in October 2021, after IDEO reorganized and became one IDEO North America (IDEO NA). Now, I was leading our Creative Operations and Belonging team and spinning up virtual employee experiences to connect over 500 IDEOers across four time zones. A group of new data scientists, Ryan Cranfill and Brian Lange, a software designer, Derek Olsen, and a communications designer, Tynan Collins, took the reigns from Jane, Lisa, and Biz, and joined me in scaling and tweaking the perk yet again.

Ryan, Derek, and Brian built a new internal website with additional functionality to allow me to run virtual Meet N' Threes at scale in under an hour. I could choose specific days of the week, windows of time, certain locations, or parts of our business, among other customizations. They also were able to auto-generate a unique Zoom link for each Google Calendar invite, eliminating one more friction point for triads.

On the branding and comms front, Tynan updated Meety's look and gave him two new buddies, Zoomy and Goog, humanizing the perk and making it easier to understand the mechanics of how it worked. To incentivize adoption, we created a special Slack channel: if you took a screenshot of your Meet N' Three, the group would automatically be entered into a monthly lottery to win prizes from a community-nominated selection of diverse-owned businesses.

By December 2022, when Zoom fatigue was very real and people were excited to return to in-person gatherings more regularly, we decided it was time to retire Meety, Zoomy, and Goog. After 1,495 virtual meetings connecting 511 IDEO NA colleagues over 13 months, we felt the trio, who brought us so much serendipity and joy, deserved some quality "them time."