Personally, I enjoy social chats a lot. More often than not, if I’m having a difficult sprint (or had a difficult last sprint), I get a boost of morale/energy after a social chat. One could argue that they have positive impact on team members and their productivity, though I can only speak for myself.
+1
However the social chats suffer from the timezone issue.
I would still attend social chats, even if they weren’t billable. But the fact that they’re billable indicates that OpenCraft recognizes the importance of people having time and space to talk about non-work related stuff, and get to know each other better, which is only natural when working together. Right now we even schedule tickets (I don’t think they block time on sprintcraft but whatever), which means that we kind of take it seriously and incorporate it into the workflow. So making them non-billable probably going to mean that they are going to die out. It would be like a “Gaming Zone” in any other company that has one in the office - it’s there and they show it to you when you get employed, but no one really uses it, because you would be shamed for spending time using it instead of doing the work.
I would like to see that happen. I would even consider doing it myself, but afraid of the social awkwardness, when you ask in the chat if anyone wants to have a social chat this week/sprint, and no one responds. But it could also have benefits - we can be more flexible with social chats, i.e. have more than one per sprint/week, more flexible with timezone and duration, since it’s no longer tied to a budget/work.
On the other hand, I think we do (desperately?) need retrospectives, which would ensure or help to fix the pain points, because more often than not, people who are struggling don’t have time to reflect and suggest/make a change. There are countless examples of it. So even if it means that we have to remove social chats, I think we should give retrospectives a try, and may be it works out for the best.