Culture has been long associated with the ‘fun’ your company is able to have in your office environment. But what happens when your team is working remotely? How do you look at building your team’s culture through remote means? While it is okay to look at culture from a similar perspective, at the core of it, it’s the reflection of your management’s pre-decided or defaulted values reflected in their day to day hustle. Therefore, culture gives leadership an opportunity to re-wire themselves and behave consciously to build the intended eco-system within their teams.
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Understanding Culture
Company culture goes beyond having fun at the workplace. The culture at a company is actually a reflection of how people work; what are their work-values, how do they prioritize & maintain a balance between work & play. For many companies; which don’t necessarily create a culture document & consciously imbibe the same in their day-to-day work life; their culture is built subconsciously by those who are leading in the front. Your founding team becomes a reflection of your company’s culture. Therefore, building culture gives leadership the opportunity to re-write themselves & behave consciously to build the intended eco-system within their teams.
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Announcing culture
Apart from understanding culture, & creating a written document around it; it is equally more important to have everyone engage with this document. Inducting teams by sharing the layout of the company culture helps bring the designed culture to life. Figuring out how to embed reminders that reinstate the culture among your team members is another aspect of how you manage to sustain your culture. The same could be done by facilitating fun activities around the awareness of your companies’ culture wherein you can create situations & ask your team how you would solve the same using the culture document.
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Increasing responsiveness
Remote work brings a lot of freedom for employees on the table. However, with the same freedom, it’s easy to start feeling virtually absent. Increasing responsiveness by personally practicing the same will help your team stay connected with each other & therefore keep the connection they share with their work at a nominal or an even better level. For a healthy culture, it’s important that your team remains connected with each other.
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Find alternatives for the water cooler talk
Small talk has its own place in an employee’s work experience. Create virtual spaces or possibilities for your team to connect with each other for small talk purposes. Catching up with each other about non-work-related stuff; helps ease out any mental blocks with respect to day-to-day job pressure. In fact, making your team meet up at a shared office space once in a while is never a bad idea to fulfill the same.
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Facetime is not underrated
Make video mandatory in your conference calls or one-to-one catch-ups. A human’s facial expressions add a lot of meaning in a relationship. When the entire team is working virtually; showing face is the least you could do to make sure the experience is balanced & there is a connection built between teams. Making video compulsory during virtual calls increases the depth of the connection & more importantly ensures higher attentiveness during the call, which otherwise could be missed out on.
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Allocate or schedule team activities
Finding space for team activities that help people bond better is important. Take up two Saturdays a month two play games, organize team activities to give your team the missing experience in their remote life.
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Support employee growth & mentorship
Give your employees the hook to latch on to the newly set up remote culture. Add to their current experience by delivering meaningful sessions that help their skills grow. Enable third party sessions that cover both cocurricular & skill-based training. Even better, align with every employee’s future plans & help to enable the same.