How to Cultivate Your Work Culture Without Having an Actual Office
Companies, small and large, have embraced work-from-home setups. Entire businesses are operating entirely remotely. With all the positive points of working from home for employees and employers, remote work is here to stay.
While it is great not having to commute to work every day, it does leave some people missing the traditional office interactions. How do office dynamics translate to the online world, with everything happening virtually? No, having an office culture isn’t a thing of the past. You can still establish a great work culture even with a remote team. Read on to learn how you can create one with a remote team.
Why Do You Need Company Culture?
Your company’s culture should reflect its goals and values. Bloomberg explains that as a group of people continues working together, they start sharing the same common set of beliefs, behavior, and assumptions. The more people spend time together, the more inevitably develops the work culture.
Work culture is often influenced by leadership. It is important to have people in managerial roles who promote healthy company culture, especially since not all managers are leaders. Other influences like workplace practices, systems, and policies also have a heavy hand in how the culture is developed since these determine how employees perform and move in the business. The employees themselves are also big contributors to the workplace culture. Their personalities and values intermingle with their colleagues.
When a company has a positive workplace culture, it significantly impacts the happiness and satisfaction of employees. This, in turn, encourages better workplace retention and higher employee engagement and promotes productivity and efficiency in teams. A good work culture also attracts talent into the organization that shares and upholds the same values as your team.
A negative work culture, on the other hand, can be detrimental to both the employees and the company. Employee turnover rates will be higher, in turn costing the company a considerable amount as they recruit and hire new employees who may also end up leaving once they’re fed up with the work culture.
How to Build Culture If You Don't Have An Office
While employees now may not be contained in an office like in the traditional workplace of the past, focusing on the other pillars of workplace culture can still develop a culture where people can thrive. After all, the company’s culture is more than just the office perks and fun little employee activities. Focus on your team’s mission, values, and goals, and go from there.
Talk to Your People
Always talk to your employees and listen to their input. No one is as intimately immersed in the work culture as your employees. Get on a call with them one by one and as a team. Layout your plan and discuss the company and team values. Discuss the kind of culture you all want to develop. What can help everyone thrive and propel the team forward? At this stage, it is essential to establish solid and open lines of communication for everyone so you can listen to what they have to say and vice versa.
Have Policies in Place
To reinforce a good work culture, have policies in place that support it. Assess your current policies and see what is missing or can be improved. You could hire a business transformation consultant who will assess your workplace and help you put new strategies in place. Consider the input of your team when creating or amending these policies. Also, make sure that the policies are updated, adapted, and compliant with the current work setups of everyone involved. This just gets rid of any confusion later on.
Having all of these policies in writing is essential so they are easier to refer back to when the need arises. Just as equally important, these policies should be accessible to everyone. Save them in your team’s cloud storage folder that’s really easy to find, or pin them in your company’s communication platform. Should anyone need a refresher on those policies, it will be easy for them to pull up.
Adapt your Systems and Processes
Your systems and processes need to be conducive to promoting efficiency and enriching your work culture. Make sure these systems and methods are updated for your remote setup. Keep the company’s values at the core and align your systems and processes to those said values.
Using the lines of communication you’ve established in the beginning, be transparent about your systems, workplace benefits, and other processes that interest the employees. Ask and always be open to your team’s feedback as well. Taking in their ideas can motivate them and possibly even help create a more positive work environment.
Culture is Always About the People
Your work culture is, first and foremost, about your people. Encourage, nurture, and develop good people in your team. Please support them by reinforcing the work culture's good values and taking action to improve those values that no longer serve your team. It all boils down to creating a culture and environment that is supposed to lift employees so they can perform their best.
Listen to your employees and provide them with the proper channels to give you their honest feedback. You can do the same.