Cultivating a company culture where employees feel connected and valued can take years of investment. Once you have one established, a strong company culture can help your business to attract and retain the best types of employees - ones that contribute by their stellar performance and help in fostering a workplace that is grounded in inclusivity, diversity, collaboration, and trust. With the future of “the office” looking different, employees are seeking new ways of feeling connected to highly dispersed teams. How can you preserve, and even build upon, the company culture you’ve worked so hard to build?
Communicate
The most important thing, for any team, is communication. If you have employees working across many different locations, having a daily or weekly team meeting so that you can communicate as a group is crucial. These virtual touch-base meetings are an opportunity to celebrate successes and tackle challenges as a collective, but more importantly, they are an accountability tool to stay focused on the most important company initiatives during a time of extreme and continuous change. For remote teams, the lack of water cooler chat and unexpected run-ins at the coffee station means it takes intentional effort in order to feel truly connected to colleagues. Leveraging technology while you have limited face-to-face time together is a good place to start. Try hosting a coffee hour via Zoom or Google Meet with a limited agenda.
Show up
No, we don’t mean physically. COVID-19 restrictions are making it nearly impossible for many to meet IRL, but teams still need present leadership. Engaging in a truly authentic way and expressing curiosity in employee well-being (professionally and also personally) can have a great impact on company morale. Those in leadership roles have taken on an additional responsibility throughout the pandemic: relationship management. Managers and executive teams are now in a position of really having to understand who they are working with and the best way to show up together to produce results.
People First
Whether we like it or not, COVID-19 has changed not only the way that we work but how we work together. Gone are the days of keeping work and life separate. We are seeing our colleagues as full people, with a huge shift in flexibility and empathy. For the first time, many employers are having to recognize (and respect) that whole people with complex lives exist within their employees. We may be seeing less of our coworkers, but we are seeing more of who they really are. Pets and children appear on video meetings; messy rooms and un-groomed hair are seemingly normal and even accepted. Extending each other the grace to be a human before a professional can help make the stress of our “new normal” a little more bearable.
Building a company culture is a marathon, not a sprint. Despite the hardships we are all facing, this is an incredibly rare opportunity to define what the future of work looks like for you and your team. Not every company will have the same vision, and that’s okay! It’s all about taking care of yourself and your team’s needs. Experiment with different models to create the feeling of connection, even if it’s behind a computer screen. It’s totally possible to maintain the intangible but powerful aspect of your business -- community.