Developing a culture full of productive, successful, and content team members doesn’t happen by accident. If you’ve spent any amount of time working in an office, you know that fostering a great work culture takes time, effort, and cooperation.
If you’re wondering how it’s even possible to keep up with this type of culture while everyone’s working remotely, you’re not alone.
As a result of the global pandemic, businesses have been trying desperately to ensure that the work they’ve put into building their culture doesn’t just disappear. After all, remote work has opened up a plethora of options to workers everywhere that weren’t always available when they had to take their location or commute into consideration.
Now, it’s easy to work from anywhere, and people are beginning to jump ship if they don’t feel that they’re totally aligned with their team, supervisor, or job itself.
It takes a whole-team approach to build and maintain a healthy work culture, so here is some inspiration to keep your team connected while they’re physically apart.
We develop a company culture through a collaborative environment and through shared experiences. Now that people are working from home, it’s so important to continue this by using messaging services such as Slack so that employees can stay connected. Random work discussions happen all the time in the office and a lot of employees are probably missing these small but important interactions that usually happen over a coffee break or at the water cooler.
Send out conversation starters and create an office playlist and have everyone add in their favourite songs. Create “WFH Challenge” like ‘What’s getting you through covid?’. Employees can post a picture and tip of what’s helping them through quarantine to Slack and nominate someone else to carry it on. This is a nice way for employees to learn more about each other.
Generally try your best to encourage your team to use messaging services for non-work discussion. The closer that your team feels to each other and the more comfortable they are conversing amongst themselves, the better they can communicate and collaborate in a professional setting.
Everyone is using video communication platforms to maintain day-to-day work and productivity. It’s also key to maintaining and building your culture. Social events don’t have to stop just because no one is in the office. Companies have been scheduling fun work-from-home events such as virtual coffee mornings, virtual pub quizzes, happy hour Friday drinks, and ‘bring your pets to Zoom’ day.
Do your best to get everyone involved and comfortable communicating via your video platform. Use your all-hands meetings to open up discussion with your team, hold question and answer sessions, share updates, and remind the team as a whole about your company’s mission often.
On the tiny Zoom thumbnail, everyone seems to look just fine. But with everyone working remotely, it’s harder to really know how everyone is really doing.
To get consistent team feedback, run monthly employee pulse checks to find out how everyone feels about their workload and job in general and their remote experience. The pulse check could be a short survey with rating system questions or open-text questions so that employees can give their insights.
This will allow you to keep track of different things over time and see if you need to zero in on anything. Example questions to ask could be “How did you feel at work this month?”, “How satisfied are you with your remote experience”, and “Do you feel as though you’d had the opportunity to learn and develop your skills – why or why not?”
The truth is, hybrid organisations are the future. A Future Forum study of knowledge workers across six different countries found that most workers value their newfound flexibility. Only 12% of people want to return working in the office five days a week. 72% of people want the option of working in a hybrid-remote office model. This is likely due to the better work-life balance that comes from not having to commute or “get ready” in the morning.
In addition to the benefits that remote work offers to employees, business owners and executive teams should recognise the advantages of hiring from a broader talent pool, reducing real estate costs, and generally operating more efficiently and with less overhead.
Leaders will do well to embrace these changes early on and recognise that thriving in this new era of work will depend on being open to new formulas for building and maintaining culture.
As we continue to work from home, building company culture is critical for employee engagement and productivity. By implementing some of the above tips to your company, you’re already on the right track to keeping your company culture alive.
Remember that culture totally guides actions and interactions in the workplace, and it’s the key to your business’s success.
We write a lot about company culture, and can also help you implement automations and services that will help your entire team work from home more efficiently.
