Company culture weighs heavily on business success because it affects how your employees feel about core values and how your customers perceive you. Building a strong company culture makes your company appealing to prospective hires and current employees and has never been more important than in the remote working world.
With the adoption of work-from-home workplace environments, companies are responsible for creating and growing a sustainable remote-work culture. Working from home doesn’t exactly offer the most substantial opportunity to organically grow culture through day-to-day office presence and collaboration. This means you will need to tweak your processes.
Rethink Onboarding
However you’ve onboarded new hires in the past, take what worked well, and figure out how you translate it remotely. For example, have you previously paired new hires with a mentor? You can build this into your remote processes by scheduling virtual face-to-face meetings or casual discussions between the two. Mirror the type of communication the two would have in the office and set things up appropriately to encourage the building of a genuine relationship.
Drive Home Missions and Goals
These are the backbone of the culture in the first place. Communicate these clearly and effectively from the beginning. Clear communication might’ve been done one way within a face-to-face environment, but remotely, a company’s values should be overcommunicated right off the bat. If every employee understands the company’s vision, it provides a stronger foundation for building a thriving remote culture and strong team overall.
Create Consistency
Establish recurring team meetings. This allows for everyone to connect with one another virtually face-to-face to discuss projects, offer advice or guidance, and just touch base. If you can still meet in-person safely, consider scheduling team-building activities at a specific frequency. These should be off-site in a more casual environment. Meetings like these help to boost morale, encourage camaraderie, and avoid interruptions in the process.
Ask for Feedback and Use it
If your company is newer to the remote-working setup, one of the most important things you can do is ask each remote employee for feedback. Find out what’s working well, what needs improvement, and what needs to be abandoned altogether. As new employees get tossed into the mix, ask them to pay close attention to the work-from-home process and provide feedback once they are established. It’s one thing for companies to ask for feedback, it’s another to implement it. Adjustments can’t be made for everything, but the things that can change, should. It will help to improve the process for future hires while building upon a solid company culture.
Engage Employees
Working from home can become isolating and make someone feel disconnected. Avoid this by finding creative ways to keep employees engaged. Arm your team with modern communication tools that allow your team to collaborate and engage easily on a daily basis. Feeling extra creative? One way to start is by hosting a virtual happy hour. Mix in some icebreaker activities or remote-friendly games to play.
Lead By Example
If you’re the type of leader who makes demands of others and doesn’t abide by those same demands, you will not only lose the trust of your teammates, but it will also eliminate any motivation they might’ve had. Employees follow leaders. If you recommend a certain period of time that emails or messages need to be responded to within business hours, follow your own directive. If you make a virtual meeting mandatory for your team, you better show up too.
How else would you recommend creating and growing a robust remote culture? Join the conversation on LinkedIn and check out Make Sure Your Cyber Security is Protected While Working From Home.
