Promote Company Culture and Communication with Standup Meetings

As employees continue working remotely, one of your key goals as an employer should be maintaining your company culture. It is important to emphasize that you have the same expectations of your remote teams as you would for on-site workers. Developing a safety culture with your remote team is just as important as it is in a traditional workplace environment.

They can share relevant news and fun facts, ask silly questions, and bond as work friends. Hosting “lunch and learn” sessions, where speakers share their knowledge over a virtual conference while the rest of the team eats their lunch. Offering an education stipend for employees to use on continuing education, online classes, and personal development courses. Send company swag on work anniversaries to encourage them to feel proud about being part of your team.

Prioritize communication

If you notice individuals who are counterproductive to your team’s success, pull them aside to discuss their behavior. If nothing improves after making an effort to positively address the situation, it is time to part ways and help them find another position more suited for their needs and goals. Sometimes disengaged employees are stuck in a rut professionally and just need a little support to get back on their feet. While lunch breaks are not legally required, allowing employees to shut off their computer for 30 minutes to an hour each day helps create a positive work culture. Your team is not composed of robots, so expecting employees to continuously churn out quality work over the course of eight hours without breaks is unrealistic — and unhealthy.

• The flexibility to work on your own time, and in sweatpants if you choose, is one of the great advantages of remote work.
• For example, if you are using a company wide text chat tool, like Slack or others then consider creating a channel just for this.
• Then, be intentional about establishing more touch points with remote employees, reimagining onboarding processes, and fostering inclusive ways of communicating.
• Try to create questions that dive into work issues, general happiness and mood, collaboration, relationships with management, and more.
• Be sure to take your employee’s feedback into account and lean on them to help cultivate a great work experience.

In fact, in their 2018 Global State of Remote Work, Owl Labs reports that 52% of employees around the world worked remotely at least once per week, and 68% worked remotely at least once per month. Hybrid work can create new technical issues for employees, and a remote desktop microphone not working is one frustrating … Have fun with the idea of using cultural differences as a means for your entire team to learn build team culture more about one another and educate themselves about far-flung countries and unfamiliar customs. From one culture to the next, the differences in how workers approach their day can be astonishingly broad. What a strong work ethic looks like in one culture might be completely different compared to another. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation.

What you can learn from existing remote-first companies in 2021

Having a set time gives everyone the opportunity to stay in contact and allows reassurance and support even from afar. Just because your team may prefer to send messages, don’t underestimate the value of in-person meetings or simple one-on-one interactions. I have a friend who uses the Obi-Wan ‘these aren’t the droids you’re looking for’ hand-wave in business meetings and claims that it works. For those of us who haven’t mastered the ways of the force, we’re left with using tactics from psychology and Neuro Linguistic Programming to increase our chances of winning an argument. If you want to show someone that you understand them, then first you have to actually understand them and that can only come from spending some time listening to their point of view. Start with criticism; if you’ve understood them then you should also be able to empathize with why someone might think or feel the way they do.

The Work Institute predicts this trend could result in a 35% turnover rate by 2023. A driving force behind the high turnover rate is directly related to company culture.Studiesshow that employees who don’t like their organization’s culture are 24% more likely to quit. On average,estimatessuggest it costs as much as $10,000 to replace an employee who earns $50,000 per year.

This data shows that the chief HR officer plays a leadership role in the employee experience twice as frequently as does the CIO (35% versus 17%). This study shows that the two key roadblocks to effective HR/IT collaboration are lack of mutual understanding and lack of common objectives. Geographically distributed workplace and understand the diverse cultural elements of your employees, you may be pleasantly surprised to discover how much your global team members have in common.

Overcommunicate with your team.

Assign different admin roles and permissions depending on the type of contract of the employee and let your remote teams rave about all those work-unrelated topics they would normally chat about during office breaks. A remote-first work structure can take a toll on employee mental health. According to Buffer’s report, The 2021 State of Remote Work, loneliness is one of the most common challenges remote workers experience.

Ultimately, this could reduce the chances of attracting and recruiting top talent. Once you’ve established a robust remote team culture, it self-replicates. You’ll see it in action when team members collaborate, communicate in real-time, and accelerate their productivity using powerful work management platforms like Wrike. Get results from anywhere when you connect your teams using one digital workspace. While an organization’s offerings such as pay or benefits are important, a positive day-to-day experience is key to retention.

Almost every executive we talked with over the past few months knows that we’re entering a new, untested period. It will take early experimentation to generate ways of promoting remote-first cultures while preserving the value of in-office symbols and side-by-side work to strengthen culture. Tolerance for failures along the way will be essential to finding a path forward.

For example, 94 percent of people managers say “a positive workplace culture creates a resilient team of employees,” according to a Society for Human Resource Management survey. Delivering an effective and positive corporate culture now requires much more focus and investment in the employee digital experience. For those workers that spend only a small amount of their work time in an office, the digital experience will drive their perception of culture and the organization. It will take the combination of new digital workspace platforms that provide the technology foundation and teamwork between HR and IT to ensure the promotion of a positive corporate culture and employee experience. As more workers put the quality of their digital work experience at the top of their list of expectations, the time is now to start on both tasks to ensure the business succeeds.

How Much Does Culture Matter to Your Employees, Even When Remote?

Learn everything there is to know about real-time communication, its challenges and benefits in remote workplaces…. As companies around the world have marked one year anniversary of full-on remote work, it’s a perfect time to reflect on the models and strategies that achieved success in remote-first work. One of the key building blocks of an efficient remote-first culture is asynchronous communication. As opposed to onsite and some instances of “remote-ish” work where the majority of communication is done synchronously, remote-first requires a more substantial shift to asynchronous communication.

It should clearly articulate the company culture to everyone in your organisation, new and old, right from day one. It should be clear about expectations, how performance is measured, how you assess employees for cultural fit, and the like. Whilst it is great to end up with a list of words or values, it is also very important, even more so with a remote or distributed team, to document what you hope your company culture becomes. Having a set of values can really harness the direction your culture takes.

In a survey of people who found remote work as a result of the pandemic, 48% of respondents said that transparency is key when it comes to feeling a strong sense of job security. Transparent communication is critical for maintaining your culture while employees are working remotely. Employees need to trust you, especially during a crisis when job security is likely one of their top concerns.

If you’re trying to create an enjoyable and casual work environment, use chat apps likeSlackorMicrosoft Teams. These tools make communicating more natural and also include features designed to make professional communication more personal, including gifs, emojis and other forms of expression. Onboarding new employees and getting them adjusted to culture is of particular and growing concern. Prior to the pandemic, Slack onboarded all employees from within and outside the U.S. by flying them to San Francisco headquarters for a week of education sessions and engagement with executive leaders. To maintain a remote workplace culture, employers need to establish a virtual environment in which team members still feel connected and protected. Employees need to feel that their entire team is working hard together and staying productive, and that their opinions matter.

Still, the remote-first model organizes all procedures to align with remote working. All meetings, for example, are held via video conference regardless of the number of attendees working from the office at that particular time. Your company’s virtual onboarding process sets the tone for how new employees will feel and think about your organization. You want them to have everything they need to succeed and feel like they’re part of your team.

Ideas To Recession-Proof Your Business In 2023

Right now, fostering a culture of belonging is more important than ever. In fact, only one in six diverse employees feel supported by their organizations right now. While everyone wants high pay, there’s a limit on what employees are willing to sacrifice to get it. A strong company culture can safeguard your business by fostering employee https://globalcloudteam.com/ happiness and long-term goodwill. In today’s employment climate, companies face the challenge of finding the right candidates as they expand. To attract the best talent, businesses must consider various structures, including on-site, hybrid and remote, as well as attractive employee perks like flexible schedules and paid time off.

Tips to Improve Work Culture

Not hearing feedback may lower their self-esteem or make them feel as if their hard work doesn’t matter. Even if your remote workers are connected to the rest of your team through instant messaging or video chat, they may still feel isolated. Distance doesn’t have to be a barrier, especially with the tools and technologies available to facilitate communication and connectivity. Keep your remote workers engaged, productive, and happy with these 10 easy-to-implement and practical tips. Transparency and clear expectations are the building blocks of any strong team environment. With remote teams increasingly becoming a ‘new normal,’ it’s vital to step up and create the culture you want for your company.

Use active listening to create inclusive workspaces

As the world’s largest development platform, GitHub supports millions of developers and companies’ journeys to building and maintaining software. With offices and distributed teams across the US, Europe, and Asia, GitHub is one of the examples of successful remote-first companies. To prevent the silo mentality and encourage a more connected remote-first culture, consider encouraging people from different teams to socialize together in a relaxed environment. Although not so easily achieved due to globally distributed teams, this approach is quite beneficial in preventing isolation and other common risks of people working apart from each other. Depending on the size of the organization, companies can schedule team- or company-wide informal get-togethers on a regular basis.

Allow employees to pursue their passions, both in and outside of the office, and encourage information sharing between colleagues. This exchange of knowledge will lead to improved employee relationships, collaboration and camaraderie. Proximity bias is when managers unconsciously favor employees they are in close contact with. In a distributed team, that could mean workers who spend a good chunk of time in the office are more likely to receive raises, promotions and career-boosting assignments than their remote colleagues. Expressing appreciation through public recognition is a key part of establishing a sense of belonging for remote teams.

Just recently, Salesforce also embraced remote work culture and that says a lot about where the now and the future of work culture is. Although remote work might not be ideal all the time, make the most of it and offer a sense of normalcy for your employees. Continue operations as usual and set your employees up for success so they feel motivated to work every day, even if it’s from their home office or couch. Monster states that employees aren’t the only ones who benefit from working from home; a company can benefit just as greatly from a remote employee. Here are three ways you can promote a more connected remote work culture for your employees right now. A promotional video for Tandem recites the common complaints of distributed work.

Establishing a mentorship program to connect newer employees with seasoned veterans. You’ll help build a sense of belonging and motivate employees to learn new skills and tips from their peers. Having a solid company culture and upholding these values is also one of the best ways to retain remote talent. Fail to get your company culture right, and you may have to deal with miscommunication, lower productivity levels, tanking employee morale, high turnover rates, and more (yikes!). Try these strategies to improve communication to help you build and maintain your remote culture. Sign up to receive employee engagement and company culture articles by email.

You never know where the next big idea will come from, so let every employee have a seat at the table and feel empowered to share their thoughts. Work culture not only guides employees in the workplace, but it also guides customers on whether they want to do business with you. Work culture guides employees on what behaviors, expectations and matters of importance are part of the company’s current DNA. Even though it is essential to make use of a variety of digital and more traditional communication tools, be specific about which tools will be used by your company. It is essential that everyone is on the same platform and knows how to participate.