Info Magzine: How Can You Maintain Company Culture When Everyone Is Working from Home?

February
24, 2021

5 min learn

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“Corporate culture” is tough to outline. Often it is solely implicitly understood and develops organically, slightly than being explicitly expressed and deliberate from the highest down. Your firm’s tradition turns into its character, and has a significant affect on how the general public perceives it, in addition to how the workers, companions and different suppliers work together with the general public and with one another.

Nowadays, with so many corporations compelled to maintain their places of work closed on this time of social distancing, working from residence has change into the “new normal.” Research from the digital doc group app FYI has discovered that “improved culture” is one of the top responses when individuals had been requested how corporations can assist improve the expertise of distant work through the coronavirus disaster.

So how will you ensure that your culture survives when there’s no bodily water cooler to assemble round?

I typically prefer to remind the executives I work with that even earlier than the Covid-19 disaster hit, this was a significant problem. Larger corporations with a number of areas, for instance, have at all times discovered it tough to keep up a cohesive company tradition. It’s made much more difficult as corporations lengthen their ecosystem to companions, third-party suppliers and freelancers exterior of the rapid company construction.

Corporate tradition is an important guiding pressure, however how does it develop when nearly all of an organization’s employees, suppliers and freelancers by no means set foot within the workplace? Data offered by Global Workplace Analytics means that teleworking had change into fairly widespread even previous to the Covid-19 lockdown, growing by 140 percent since 2005 – and never simply from the self-employed and gig employees; 4.3 million staff now work from residence at the least half the time.

At the identical time, the self-employed inhabitants has grown by 2.4 %, the home-based self-employed inhabitants grew by 7.3 %, and the telecommuter inhabitants grew by 1.7 %.

Corporate tradition when face-to-face interactions are out of date

Collaboration in a distant surroundings does take some further work – however a distributed group is admittedly identical to another group, whether or not they work face-to-face or not. A latest Harvard Business Review podcast famous that profitable distant work is based on three principles: Communication, coordination and tradition.

Communication and coordination are simply achieved by way of any variety of refined real-time communication and social sharing instruments, however the tradition is what creates an actual sense of belief and engagement.

Corporate tradition is greater than making a pleasant break room with snug chairs and bringing in a field of doughnuts on Friday – creating it means deliberately participating staff, educating them, and offering venues for interactions, data sharing and coaching. Traditionally, this has been performed dwell, with on-site in-services or particular off-site occasions, however this turns into problematic when an organization has hundreds of distant staff and companions scattered all through a number of nations.

Those occasions can nonetheless happen just about. Fortunately, digital assembly platforms have advanced to the purpose the place they are often extremely interactive, visible, and extra importantly, successfully replicate the sense of “being there.” And sure, there are many methods to boost your “virtual happy hours.”

Your culture begins with onboarding – and especially when remote workers are involved, interactive video conferencing sessions can be a highly effective method of engaging those workers from the very beginning.

The key to success is in the level of engagement – and rather than a one-directional webinar session, culture can be developed and maintained by ensuring that teams huddle regularly, although not so often and for so long that “Zoom fatigue” begins to set in. Finding the precise stability between dwell and asynchronous conferences is vital, as is investing in giving individuals easy accessibility to the information they should do their jobs independently.

Best practices for distant company tradition

A 2017 research by Deloitte famous that 80 percent of survey respondents see culture and engagement as top priorities. The Deloitte report noted that traditional learning management systems are rapidly being replaced with new tools that better meet the need for interaction and participation.

Best practices in developing that culture include holding managers accountable for training, communications and collaboration, and arming them with the tools necessary to do so in a manner consistent with the expectations of digitally savvy workers.

More importantly, consistency and frequency become even more important in a remote environment, and regular interactive video meetings should be held to reinforce corporate messaging and culture, as well as to impart specific training information.

Also, because of the efficiency of video conferencing, micro-learning becomes much more possible. Unlike live training sessions that require more coordination, remote training opportunities can be held more frequently, and at the same time, become more customized to meet the specific needs of each different group of employees.

Finally, measure results – look at the social interactions, comments, and social media sharing that takes place as a result of each session; measure user satisfaction and participation, and encourage feedback and input from participants. In so doing, you will be able to create a virtual environment that is not only the “subsequent smartest thing to being there,” in many ways, it’s better than being there.

Thriving remotely as a collective

Maintaining a cohesive company culture is a challenge, even when you’re dealing with a relatively small team all working from one location. Multi-branch teams, teams built to operate remotely, and teams forced to suddenly work from home during a health crisis have it even harder. But with the right perspective and approach, your team can remain as cohesive and invested as ever.

Related: Company Culture Is Everything

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