How can companies maintain or build a strong culture while working from home?
Building a Strong Organizational Culture When Expanding Remote Work Offerings
Whether you’re expanding your remote work offerings or becoming a remote-first organization entirely, the question of how your company can maintain and even strengthen its corporate culture is sure to come to mind. It is certainly a question asked to Stegmeier Consulting Group (SCG) regularly in these changing times.
For so long, organizational culture was largely developed and impacted by how people collaborated in person, often in an office. With remote work lessening the aspect of physical presence and interaction, how can your company ensure its work culture doesn’t suffer? How far should companies extend their efforts to make sure culture is understood and developed favorably when remote work is the norm?
The success of many remote companies shows that it is still possible to achieve a successful work culture despite the geographical boundaries. Through a thorough understanding of the concept, and with the right tools and mindset, a company can thrive remotely and ensure its unique corporate culture stays strong, even with employees being physically out of the office.
This page will help you understand the essence of corporate culture and its importance for your organization, as you develop and introduce your remote work strategy.
Understanding Corporate Culture
Corporate culture is a familiar yet mysterious concept that people encounter in the workplace. It is an idea that holds power and value – from applying for a job, getting hired, and finally working for a business. It outlines how you will enjoy your work environment and job role, depending on how you fit into the work culture of your company.
Yet, in as much as the term is mentioned, its precise definition is as difficult to state as the idea of culture itself: diverse and varying from one to another.
It can be seen as something similar to the concept of personality. Just as someone’s personality is formed through values, learning, assumptions, experiences, and interests, a company’s culture is perceived in the same way. Simply put, culture equals behavior.
This analogy emphasizes just how important workplace culture is, and how portraying the wrong “personality” could lead to difficulties in different facets of the business.
SCG’s workplace research touches on the role of corporate culture when managing change. This is the set of values embodied in business operations, created through the interaction of employees, management, and the business’s external environment. It can make or break a business. It can help achieve goals or hinder optimum performance.
Keeping your Culture Alive and Consistent in a Work From Home Setting
With how the COVID-19 pandemic catapulted businesses, big and small, to suddenly work from home, implementing various ways to adapt and work in the new normal was prioritized by companies.
Management plays a vital role in maintaining, if not improving, work culture, especially in a remote work setting. Considering the influence that leaders have on employees, it becomes critical for managers to quickly embrace the idea.
Leadership’s acceptance of remote work is one of the largest roadblocks to achieving a strong remote work culture. It has a greater impact on employee cooperation and performance, even over the frailties of technology. After all, technology, and all of its intricacies, have already been present pre-pandemic. It’s a concept well understood, but just in need of better execution, now that people are adjusting to remote work.
Meanwhile, the remote work concept requires a new mindset for most managers, who are used to keeping their employees in-check and literally, within their line of sight.
Managers and leaders trusting their employees even when they are out of sight — an entirely different philosophy that they should be prepared for, and be able to accept, foster, and apply, to maintain a positive work culture.
Building Culture in Remote Teams
Work culture is shaped through time, and fosters connections among the people within a business. It goes beyond the free lunch and standing desks. It takes intention and careful planning and action to create the culture you want to inculcate in your people.
These considerations are also important when building a remote culture, only this time, there is a need to put in extra effort into all aspects since people are in different locations, maybe even different time zones, and often in work settings that are not as uniformly designed and furnished as what employees would experience on-site.
Host Remote Team Activities
While people are physically apart, there are plenty of fun ways you can interact and stay connected. Thanks to technology, employees can enjoy ways to have “non-work related” gatherings such as virtual game nights, online skill-sharing events, social media events where people can discuss things unrelated to work, and even virtual happy hours (as long as they are off-the-clock, of course!).
It is important that a company squeezes in these activities to create a sense of normalcy within your team. It encourages the idea that work from home is just as fun and valued as any other office job. It can also be a great stepping stone in strengthening your work culture as employees transition from an in-office setup, to a remote work arrangement. Thus, it is essential that you choose activities that help develop the kind of culture you want to create.
You just have to be careful in hosting these remote team activities, as these might not before everyone. “Zoom Fatigue” is a real thing and with a likely increased frequency of video calls, even fun team events may be viewed as unwelcome at times. Facilitate events, but do not force your people to join in when they do not feel like doing so. Be open enough to let them understand that they have the choice to join in or not and that there is no problem at all if they decide not to. The key is to always make them feel welcome but not make it mandatory. This way, there is full cooperation and genuine connection when these virtual events are held, since everyone who comes in to attend is truly interested to be there.
There are a lot of tools that you can use to set up these virtual gatherings. One way is to launch all these activities in a special calendar, and people can pick which one they want to join in, on which dates. This not only diversifies the activities but again emphasizes the employee’s freedom to join in or not.
Of course, some virtual team-building activities are a must, but just the same, they should be curated in a way and in an atmosphere that befits the employees that would be involved.
When all these things are successfully implemented, it can greatly help create the culture you desire to achieve for your remote team.
Listen to Feedback
There will always be an adjustment period for everyone during the transition from on-site to remote working. Even when an employee is onboarded directly for remote work, they still need to get accustomed to working with new colleagues and within your work culture.
Trial and error will occur, and in this regard, data should be gathered to see which parts of the remote work arrangement need improvement. What better way to gather that data than through feedback. Even when processes have been fully adapted, a business should not stop receiving feedback through various assessments and surveys. Opportunities for feedback on how things are going, allow employees to share their voice and for your organization to pivot if needed to quickly address any problems.
Be careful, though, to set the expectations that a voice does not equal a vote; while opinions and ideas are welcome, it doesn’t necessarily mean employee suggestions will be implemented, but rather are items the enterprise will consider. Similarly, it’s important to balance methods and frequency of data collection. We often hear from clients at the start of a project that “our people are surveyed to death” or that they just conducted a survey. Fortunately, SCG is adept at analyzing existing data points and asking poignant follow-up questions whether in a virtual focus group or in 1:1 remote interviews. By digging deeper, we can identify where some of the gaps are, between your perceived and actual remote work culture.
Establish Solid Work from Home Policies
Throughout all the changes and transitions, a standardized set of policies should be created to place everything in order and establish a sense of uniformity within the business. These guidelines help balance and coordinate the rules and regulations across all departments, as well as set the expectations from each and everyone in the company.
Work from home policies indicate how the business wishes to push forward with its remote work strategy. In many ways, an organization’s remote work policies and procedures are reflective of its culture itself. Hence, careful planning should take place.
From our experience, companies with traditional, hierarchical cultures and structures tend to settle on more robust policies for their work from home programs. These documents tend to have more guardrails for the conduct, set clear expectations for performance, and outline eligibility, often painstakingly. While employees may view this structure as draconian, this tends to be a point of comfort for mid-level managers and even directors who are used to a line of sight management style.
Conversely, less siloed and more progressive employers are often comfortable with their work from home policies and procedures being as simple as a one or two-page loose description of the company’s philosophy on remote work. Typically, these organizations are ones where there have been some pockets of telework happening for some time now, especially ones where there are clear metrics of performance that can be tracked.
As remote work is formalized on a larger scale internally, it’s often decided that some type of guiding declaration be made available to employees. Whereas in the example above, the policy may be viewed as too formal, in this scenario one risk is in employees feeling lost. Even though they are being shown considerable trust from the organization, if there is not a strong training program and feedback mechanism in place, this casual approach can backfire.
Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to policies and procedures for teleworking. Developing a remote work policy takes careful deliberation to ensure it is aligned with what you want your organizational culture to be moving forward, something SCG is very happy to help clients with, thanks to our expertise in workplace flexibility.
Once this is ready and set into motion, not only will the work culture within your company strengthen, but it will also help with talent attraction. An established approach to remote work exudes a sense of stability to potential hires, increasing the chances of them choosing to join your company.
Adopting and Maintaining Work Culture in a Hybrid Workforce
A hybrid workforce occurs when a business retains some portion of its office space and allows some employees (often front-facing and operational employees) to work on-site. Meanwhile, members of other departments stay at home and work remotely. It also encompasses the strategy of allowing employees to work at home for individual tasks, while a physical space remains for when they wish to meet and do collaborative work. In any case, it means that some people are tasked to work at the office, while others are assigned to work from home–and not necessarily the same people, on the same days!
The appeal of the hybrid workplace is becoming evident as organizations begin planning life after COVID and people are asked to move back to their offices. Needless to say, a lot of businesses still need to retain physical offices, but with the added understanding that some things will now be different.
This includes having to address how culture would be affected if people are divided in terms of workspace. Will people in the office be more culturally bonded? Will people at home be left out of the circle? If so, will those working remotely be more hesitant to keep working at home since they fear being “unseen” by their leaders and peers?
Being aware of this possibility is the first step to making sure that these scenarios do not worry your employees. Make the conscious effort to include them in discussions during video conferences, and refrain from focusing only on the people within the physical room. Avoid making changes and decisions on their outputs and projects before first communicating with them. Employees may initially take the attitude that it is too much work to connect with remote colleagues and that decisions can be made quicker by simply walking over to another colleague’s desk and chatting there. It is important to establish a mindset oft because someone is “not in the office” does not mean they’re not part of the process. In fact, it can be a good habit to allow remote employees to host the meetings for their projects so that even when they are working from home, they are still engaged and feel valued.
This again calls for effort from team leaders. It is in the managers’ hands to ensure that everyone in his or her team feels included, whether they are in the office, and most especially when they are at home.
What can you do when your remote culture isn’t what you want it to be?
You may have already implemented a work from home strategy and are wondering why has it not been working for you. Can it actually work for your business? What do we need to do to get our culture back to how it was in the office?
It’s hard to improve your organizational culture, especially when there is a significant portion of your workforce working remotely, without first diagnosing why things aren’t going well. With any organizational problem, proper data gathering and analysis can greatly aid in discovering the root challenges at play. When necessary, businesses can ask to conduct training on the best possible approaches to transition to remote work, based on all the gathered data. Afterwhich, careful planning and implementation of the proposed change can take place. It is in this stage that change management is critical to avoid overwhelming your business with changes. This is where SCG’s years of experience in change management and workplace strategy come in.
If you’re ready to get your corporate culture back to what your website claims it is, SCG is ready to help you. Let’s achieve a work from home culture that is aligned with your business goals and makes employees proud to be a part of your organization. Fill out the form below to get in touch with us.
