Christina Breda Antoniades, Aug 8
In the early days of his role as director of Student Employment Services, Nick Lantz was enjoying a holiday gathering on the Homewood campus when he noticed something curious.
“I was sitting there with the team that I would be leading, and I said to them, ‘How long did it take you to get to know everyone in this room?'” recalls Lantz, who could tell by the responses that his new team wasn’t making many connections with people outside their everyday work. “I knew then that it would be important to build relationships and collaborative opportunities for people, to come up with a way for them to meet folks that maybe they wouldn’t meet in their day,” he says. That got him thinking: “What if you are randomly paired? Maybe you hit it off, maybe you collaborate, maybe you just meet a new person.”
The result was Coffee With Colleagues, launched in July 2018 and sponsored by University Experiential Learning. Through the program, staff and faculty are matched with a randomly selected colleague for a 30-minute meeting, either in person or online.
The idea behind the venture was to help facilitate connections that establish rapport to break down silos and encourage collaboration, share best practices, and reduce barriers to the free flow of information and ideas.
After conceiving the idea, Lantz worked with programmer analyst Joy Paulose to develop the tools—including a website and database—that would allow colleagues to connect. The program was available initially to the Homewood campus and is now also available to SAIS faculty and staff, with discussions underway to expand further. More than 300 faculty and staff have participated so far, with about 50% choosing to meet online. Colleagues who sign up are given a new match each month. To help the meetings go smoothly, the Coffee With Colleagues team offers suggestions on discussion topics and how to use the time.
When Coffee With Colleagues launched, Julie Kuhn Sanchez, then an employer outreach coordinator with the Life Design Lab at Homewood, was immediately intrigued. “I’ve always believed that real connection fuels a thriving workplace, and this program offered a simple, brilliant way to do just that,” she says. As part of her job, Sanchez frequently engaged with employees in other departments and across the university, and she often found those conversations fruitful. “I knew that every conversation left me with something that either enhanced my work or simply felt good,” she says.
By 2023, Sanchez had moved into a new role as senior employee experience specialist for the Krieger School’s Office of Human Resources was excited to bring Coffee With Colleagues to the school’s faculty and staff. “It was a no-brainer. Coffee With Colleagues was one of the first things I knew I wanted to throw my weight behind and advocate for.” She now tells staff about the program as part of their school orientation.
As a Coffee With Colleagues participant, Sanchez has made multiple matches, both in person and virtual. For one pairing, she met with a faculty member at a coffee shop near Homewood. “It was the most energizing conversation,” she says. “I could see the passion he has for the work he’s doing with students and his writing courses.” The two, who share a background in the liberal arts, took the conversation beyond work into philosophy and other topics. “We took up the whole 30 minutes and then we used our lunch hour to keep talking,” Sanchez says.
Though it may sound perfect for the extroverted, the experience isn’t limited to those who are typically quick to strike up a conversation with a stranger. The commonality of working at JHU usually helps get the conversation started, says Coffee With Colleagues participant Charlee Dulaney, a senior instructional technologist in the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation at the Krieger School. “You don’t have to be the most gregarious person,” she says. Dulaney signed up for the program shortly after arriving at Johns Hopkins in late 2023 and has a favorite question to kick off her meetups. “I always ask, ‘What brought you to Hopkins?’ Being new to Hopkins, my journey is fresh in my mind, so I’m always curious,” she says. “The thing I find so fascinating has been people’s career trajectories. It’s been really interesting to hear the different careers and industries people were in before coming here.”
For Dulaney, the meetings are a nice opportunity to step away from the office and connect in a more casual way. And while she often finds herself talking about hobbies and family with her matches, she also gets a window into a host of different departments and functions at Hopkins, which is helpful in her job. “I talk to people from so many different backgrounds: astronomy, physics, finance, student affairs. It enables me to learn about their office and what they do.”
Participants can pause their involvement—Sanchez and Dulaney have done so during particularly busy work periods—and resume at any time. And, while colleagues may hit it off, “what I love about the program is you can keep in touch with the person or not. There is no obligation to be the person’s best friend or have a long-term relationship,” says Sanchez, who adds that even with one-off meetings, “I always walk away with inspiration that could apply to my role.”
That type of inspiration, and the connections the program fosters, tie in nicely with the university’s Ten for One strategic vision, Lantz says. “At a university as large and decentralized as Hopkins, making space for meaningful connections helps us work collaboratively,” he says. “When people take the time to listen, share, and learn from each other, even for just 30 minutes, it creates ripple effects that strengthen our community in powerful ways.”
Read more: Got 30 minutes? Get to know the JHU community—one person at a time | Hub
