Tag: community building

It takes a lot of effort to build a workplace culture. Even as companies continue to embrace a hybrid working model that is a blend of remote working and office-based work, it should not be a factor to dilute your corporate culture. 

Maintaining workplace culture in a hybrid work setting should seek to establish a virtual environment that enables members to feel connected and protected. Your team needs to feel that they are all working hard and staying productive and that their opinions matter. 

Maintaining corporate culture when people aren’t actually in the office can be a real challenge. You might find it difficult to conduct the usual team-building and collaborative activities, and connections among employees might weaken.

The Importance of Maintaining a Company Culture While Working Remotely

Working from home is a brand new way of doing things. Whether your team is working remotely or not, chances are your customers are working from home. Maintaining company culture establishes an environment that keeps you connected with your customers. 

Employees who feel disconnected at work tend to have lower performance, lower productivity, and can even quit. Work culture creates opportunities for everyone to feel connected and work with happy and productive teams.

Your remote team needs the motivation to stay productive. A company culture maintains trust among teams and leads to motivation. Motivated employees are highly adaptable to change, have a positive work attitude, and are free to approach you with any work-related problem. 

Maintaining corporate culture ensures that your team knows what to do and when to do it. Leading a remote team comes with challenges. However, company culture can help you manage expectations and equip you with the battle gears to navigate change. 

There are many ways to encourage this culture, such as:

1. Focus on the Culture You Want to Keep

Your company culture is a combination of your business’s values, mission, and goals. Define behaviors that can support company values to enable your team to live the culture you want to keep. Instil culture into your management team because managers are responsible for creating and communicating a consistent company culture.

2. Trust Your Employees

When you treat your employees with respect, you get it back. Trusted employees feel valued and feel obliged to be engaged in their work. Don’t over-monitor your team because without trust there will be less innovation, less collaboration, and less creative thinking.

Use tools such as project management apps to interact with your remote team efficiently. A project management app comes with the feature to help you plan projects with your team effectively, manage available resources, respond to problems, and keep all stakeholders involved.

3. Embrace Transparency

Transparency is essential for business success when working with remote teams. It ensures visibility into the performance of your team and guarantees a seamless workflow. Make your employees your friends, offer a platform for feedback, and allow them to speak to you openly. 

Let your team know that they can trust you because it’s easy for the remote teams to veer off track and fail to keep up the punctuality and efficiency you expect from them. Instilling transparency in remote working ensures smooth communication and enables you to stay on top of everything.

4. Enhance Flexibility

Flexibility can make your team versatile, resilient, and responsive to change. Flexibility means the ability to adapt to changes such as sudden surges in work or urgent problems. Create organization within your team and ensure that employees do not overwork themselves. 

Flexibility is also good for you as a leader. Be in a position to modify your style of leadership and revise your plan to incorporate innovations and overcome challenges. Recognize situations in which your old way of doing things isn’t working and adopt new behaviors for the current success. 

5. Address Mental Health Issues

Remote teams are likely to experience negative mental health impacts which include isolation, loneliness, feeling left out in company conversations, and finding it difficult to get away from work at the end of the day. Make your employee’s mental health a top priority to create a great employee experience. 

Encourage strategic discussions on managing anxiety and depression in dedicated avenues such as a group chat channel. Create an environment where your team can easily talk about their mental health and support mental health leave days. 

Inspire Your Team to Succeed

Despite the flexibility that comes with the work from anywhere model, employees still experience downsides of this approach such as feeling alone, isolated, and left out of important company organizations. To help your remote team stay connected, consider keeping communication going, encourage informal meetings, synchronize work schedules, celebrate important dates and milestones, and rethink your collaboration methods, and tools.