Another company that finds it completely natural to have virtual holiday parties is Toptal, a fully remote tech firm with hundreds of employees and no physical office. Breandan Beneschott, the company’s co-founder and COO, recalls that three years ago he didn’t know what to expect when there was time set aside for a holiday party. “All of a sudden, half the people were dressed up as Santas and stuff, and the other people had Christmas lights around their desks,” he says. “It ended up being a several-hour virtual Christmas party with everybody's videos turned on. You're talking and joking, and people are pouring champagne or eggnog, or whatever. It was awesome." Now, Toptal’s holiday parties include drop-ins from employees’ plus-ones, as well as a Secret Santa gift exchange, which has employees shipping presents to coworkers across time zones.

Mark Bosma, Toptal’s vice president of sales, says that the idea for a virtual holiday party originated as a break from standard, everyday meetings. “We don’t often get a chance to talk without an agenda,” he says. “The idea of having a call together where we could just chat and enjoy ourselves was appealing.” The first year there were about 10 attendees. In a later iteration of the party, it reached the limit of videoconference participants permitted by Skype, and Bosma had to find another venue.

When I ask if the videochat-enabled parties are awkward, Bosma says, “No, not really. Videochatting is an entirely natural means of communication for us. We live it every day.” Indeed, Toptal was conceived without the analog baggage—commutes, having most employees live in the same area—that comes with having an office. Beneschott told me that since he co-founded the company in 2010, his company has been able to opt out of “the ping-pong-table culture” of Silicon Valley office amenities, which allows him to “go on LinkedIn and hire anybody”—regardless of location—“which is something almost no company can actually do.” Toptal’s employees live around the world, and the company rents houses in exotic locales for employees to fly to and work in.

Conversation may flow naturally at virtual holiday parties when employees already interact with one another remotely every day, but Theodoro, of Xerox, says that such gatherings require a bit more structure than festivities in or near physical offices. “It's not like a happy hour, where you walk around and talk to people, although we do bring drinks to our parties sometimes,” she says. To account for this, she comes up with activities and themes for conversation. “You generally have a topic and then everybody—we know how to take turns, because we're used to that dynamic, and there's really no holding back. There's a lot of humor,” she says.

Whether she knows it or not, Theodoro was using one of the strategies that Mazmanian has researched. The sorts of go-around-in-a-circle conversation prompts that Theodoro described is a good example of an “interaction script,” a term that Mazmanian coined with Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Mike Lee, her research partners. Mazmanian is quick to admit that “these very basic, almost roll-your-eyes-type” prompts—such as playing “Two Truths and a Lie”—“become these very powerful legitimators for new kinds of interaction,” making a space for playfulness and giving everyone in a meeting license to talk, no matter their job title.