A strong, positive and supportive company culture is key to harbouring productive employees and generating quality work results. Managing and promoting an office-based organizational culture that is aligned with the company’s greater objectives requires time and effort to be successful. With the pandemic forcing brands globally to accept remote work arrangements, the importance of human resources and organizational behaviour management has been amplified. Businesses must continue to innovate and accept digital transformation to outlast these difficult times, and with the employees driving the key activities of any organization, ensuring their engagement and opinion of your organization is maintained.
So, what does maintaining organizational culture while working from home look like in practice? Follow these 5 best practices listed below to find out:
Communicate more than you think you need to
In a digital space, it can be difficult to gauge the daily activities of your team members and understand when they are busy with tasks or free for a chat. By encouraging everyone to share their status throughout the day and communicating by message or video call often.
Host weekly check-in meetings
Holding status update meetings is great to gain a sense of what everyone is working on, and how each individuals’ efforts are contributing to the greater organizational success. To be inclusive, check-in with everyone on how they’ve adapted to new work environments and if they need any unique supports to help them stay productive and healthy.
Implement weekly community building activities
In order to stay connected to each other, use your team’s messaging channel to host weekly challenges focused on learning more about your teammates as unique individuals. Challenges could include listing hobbies outside of work, naming favourite activities to do while staying safe and social distancing, sharing pictures of pets, and much more! The goal is to keep employees engaged and show appreciation for them as an individual despite having to connect through digital means for now.
Encourage video use in meetings
When meeting digitally with team members, encourage all individuals to turn on their cameras. By doing so, the friendliness and familiarity of communicating in a face to face manner replicates the structure and stability of the normal colleague experience.
Consider sharing an internal employee newsletter
Internal employee newsletters share a review of current activities, celebrate achievements and successes, employee birthdays and highlights of team community building activities. Open rates for internal newsletters are very strong and help to ensure alignment throughout a team.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and disconnected from others as remote working scenarios become the new normal for numerous organizations, however due to the convenience and safety provided by remote work setups, companies must adapt and flourish once again. By implementing these 5 best practices, you will be able to give your team a sense of structure, stability and the genuine empathy needed to drive their commitment.
