How to Maintain Company Culture While Working Remotely
Managers have a significant role in sustaining the culture.
As workers continue to work remotely, one of your primary responsibilities as an employer should be to preserve the corporate culture. You worked hard to create a workplace culture that encourages your people to offer their best efforts, remain productive, and find satisfaction and fulfilment in their jobs—and remote work doesn’t have to ruin that.
Learn about the variables that need to be emphasised and maintained when workers are working outside of the office.
The Importance of Keeping the Company Culture
Maintaining business culture entails more than offering team-building activities or funding workplace events, trips, and celebrations—though they may be beneficial, even if just electronically.
Employers must create a virtual environment in which team members feel connected and safe in order to sustain a remote working culture. Employees must believe that their whole team is working hard and keeping productive and that their perspectives are valued. To do this, they must maintain constant touch with their management and coworkers.
Helping your workers remain linked to the company’s broader vision and objectives fosters a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. This is essential for increasing staff engagement.
But how difficult would it be for companies to do this? HR consultancy company Mercer discovered that more than 40% of firms reported a moderate to high effect on how its infrastructure managed the cultural and workplace transformation to working online in its research on the impact of COVID-19 on the business and workforce environment. 1
How Important Is Culture to Your Employees, Even When They Are Remote?
For many job candidates, a good corporate culture is a major consideration. According to a poll performed by global customer experience and digital solutions provider TELUS International, as a consequence of the pandemic, the majority of respondents (51%) felt less connected to their workplace culture while working remotely. 2
When asked what they miss most about working in an office, the following were the most popular responses:
- Making small talks and connecting with coworkers (57%)
- In-person collaboration with a team (53%)
- The separation between work and home life (50%)
It is now more vital than ever for employers to prioritise business culture.
According to research conducted by the Virginia-based Hinge Research Institute, when considering employment opportunities, 57% of job searchers at all career levels consider culture as essential as money. Cultural fit is more significant than a prospect’s job history and experience for 75% of talent recruiters. Perhaps most impressively, 73% of all respondents named a defined and clearly expressed culture as the most important aspect of a company’s reputation as a workplace—that is, its employer brand.
6 Ways to Maintain Company Culture While Working Remotely
While remote working is the “new normal,” your HR team, managers, and organisation as a whole play vital roles in supporting your business culture. Your workers may also assist you to reinforce the culture if they are properly empowered.
According to the TELUS research, the three most important components of developing a good virtual office culture are:
- Virtual workshops and chances for ongoing education (68%)
- Weekly employee meetings as well as one-on-one meetings with management (66%)
- Schedule adaptability (65%)
1. Reinforce and Concentrate on the Culture You Want to Create
Workplace culture develops whether or not you pay attention to it; in fact, you most certainly already have one. Actively discuss your company’s culture with senior management, supervisors, and workers.
Find strategies to support your present culture while workers work remotely if you like it. In such a situation, start by identifying the culture you want to foster to help remote workers succeed. Request that each team develop and communicate team standards that increase their capacity to collaborate when away from the office.
2. Have Faith in Your Employees
Employees who are treated with trust and respect are more inclined to step up to the plate. Instead of over-monitoring your remote workers, which may undermine their motivation and productivity, create ways for your teams to share work schedules, such as a Trello board they can use to remain informed and in contact with their progress.
Furthermore, employing platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, Workplace by Facebook, and Quip may let your group engage more effectively without having to attend many Zoom sessions.
When workers and managers are aware of their team members’ day-to-day job activities via workflow and communication technologies, that information builds trust rather than micromanagement.
3. Create Behaviours That Reinforce Your Desired Culture
When it comes to organising tasks and bringing the team together as a cohesive one, a virtual workforce needs higher leadership abilities. Many of the indications that onsite workers convey via nonverbal communication, such as slouching in a chair or appearing tired, are more likely to be missed in a virtual workplace.
Make sure your managers are prepared to give the necessary coaching, training, and support for them to flourish in areas such as the following:
- Setting stretch goals and targets for their team members in order for them to rise to the challenge of working remotely.
- Establishing performance criteria so that individuals know precisely what is expected of them
- Fostering a culture that requires and promotes employee responsibility and providing essential feedback to workers to let them know how they are performing.
- Clear communication regarding objectives, required contributions, accomplishments, difficulties, and opportunities will allow workers to create confidence in the team.
- Helping workers handle distractions and effectively leading in a virtual setting, understanding that individuals have difficulties with family members, sharing office space, homeschooling, and other issues
- Developing ties with workers and motivating each team member to contribute actively
- Responding to employee requests for assistance, input, time, and feedback in a timely way, particularly when they want more of their manager’s attention when working remotely from home.
- Paying attention to and resolving employees’ concerns about their growth and development requirements, such as via frequent coaching and development dialogues and assisting workers in finding virtual events to attend.
4. Transparency should be embraced in all employee interactions.
Transparent communication is essential for preserving company culture when people work remotely. Employees must have faith in you, particularly during a crisis when job security is likely to be one of their primary worries.
In a poll of workers who found remote employment as a consequence of the epidemic, 48% responded that transparency is essential for having a strong sense of job security.
Another 47% said they wanted to hear from CEOs, executives, and others about how current events were affecting the organisation and what was being done to defend it—including their position.
However, 38% of respondents felt that their firm should do more to keep workers informed than it was already doing. Despite the fact that over half of workers want their employer to communicate effectively about the pandemic’s impact, more than a third believe that their organisation can do better.
This is a fantastic lesson in the importance of open communication and its influence on employee trust.
5. Improve Employee Flexibility and Work-Life Balance
Attention to your workers’ work-life balance in a remote workforce scenario may strengthen your organisation’s caring culture.
Offering child care assistance to working parents, more flexible leave policies to meet the new normal, and virtual social events, for example, will strengthen employee work-life balance.
Employees like it when they are recognised on a regular basis for their efforts and hard work.
You may achieve this by recognising the obstacles they have in their remote position by arranging meetings and contact time within core hours and respecting family time in the morning and evening.
For example, your workers may need to enrol their children in homeschooling or virtual learning before they can begin working.
6. Address any mental health issues that your employees may be experiencing.
You must do more to support the good mental health of your remote employees, in addition to addressing employee work-life balance difficulties. Employees who work remotely may encounter mental health difficulties such as loneliness, lamenting the loss of a previous workplace, missing daily coworker contact, and anxiety about their employment and economic future.
According to the Mercer research, roughly 37% of employers contacted said that workers were having mental health concerns as a result of social isolation and economic distress.
Employers may address these mental health difficulties by reinforcing their culture of care, empathy, attention, and thankfulness. They should encourage their employees to utilise employee assistance programmes (EAPs), check in on a regular basis to see how they are doing and enable them to take mental health days for rest and relaxation when they feel they need it.
