Workplace culture is the pillar of social life in any company. And even if your employees always work from home and never see each other offline, it’s pivotal to keep your workplace culture positive and appealing to everyone on the team.
Yet how to succeed with this task?
“Easier said than done,” you might think. However, some feasible ways to improve your remote work culture do exist. And here we will discuss what you can do as a leader for building a positive and strong remote work culture for your own business.
What Is Remote Work Culture?
Remote work culture is a set of values, norms and customs that define how people interact and behave in a company. It is what makes employees feel as if they belong and determines whether they self-identify with the organization or not.
Note that any culture is always a collective creation. Knowledge and beliefs cannot be passed from one person to another without good communication and robust social connections. And of course, no practice can turn into a cultural tradition if only one individual is interested in it.
It means that even a highly inspirational leader can’t force a culture on their staff. To build and strengthen workplace culture, you need to gain an insight into group dynamics, employee inclinations and interests. In other words, culture development involves careful work on shared team experiences and relationships.
3 Benefits of a Positive Remote Work Culture
-
Higher employee retention rate.
Do you agree that it’s much more satisfying and rewarding to work in a supportive environment than in a toxic and hostile one? As research findings suggest, cultures that emphasize teamwork, respect and individual security tend to promote employee loyalty and long-term commitment much better than those that fail to do so. Hence, by establishing a comfortable environment for your employees, you have a good chance to build durable relationships with them and reduce HR costs.
-
Improved psychological well-being among employees.
Among the main reasons why remote working is so challenging for many people is the isolation from colleagues. Without frequent conversations or any meaningful relationships with them, one may have a hard time coping with stress, feel unsupported, disengaged and lonely. Therefore, by building a culture that fosters positive interpersonal relationships in the entire team, you will prevent the risk of burnout in your staff and minimize the costs of high employee turnover and absenteeism.
-
Better productivity and financial performance.
When your remote employees are committed, satisfied and mentally sound – thanks to well-developed workplace culture in large part – they have much fewer reasons to not perform at their best and do their jobs well. And as individual productivity enhances, the overall level of organizational productivity rises too. That’s how by influencing employee engagement in a favorable way, positive remote work culture can contribute to higher business profitability.
10 Tips on How to Build a Strong Remote Work Culture
1. Reimagine your current workplace culture
Every organizational culture is unique. Therefore, you first need to think about what type of culture you want to have in your business and which traits it should possess.
After developing a vision of perfect remote work culture, you also need to identify the tools, practices and leadership behaviors that can help you reinforce it. For instance:
- If companionship is your primary goal, prioritize frequent online and offline team meetings, open communication and conflict management.
- Want to promote a sense of security among remote employees? Then focus on providing continual manager support, never punish your workers for mistakes, offer fair compensation and benefits.
- If you fancy a culture of high professionalism, make sure to hire and retain the best talent, provide employees with plenty of opportunities for development and use high-quality collaboration software.
If there are some specific practices you want your remote team members to try, be sure to include them in the picture too. And remember that many corporate events and team traditions – including daily coffee breaks and monthly get-togethers that teams often enjoy in the regular office environment – can be easily transferred to the virtual space too. The shift to remote work doesn’t mean you have to recreate your culture from scratch. Evaluate what you already have and find a way to preserve what deserves to be preserved.
2. Nurture team relationships
Regardless of the kind of remote work culture you wish to establish, it’s always worthwhile to strengthen team cohesion. Strong interpersonal connections help remote employees be more resilient and resistant to stress. And besides, positive and trustful workplace relationships are among the main factors contributing to higher team morale, better teamwork and superior collaboration results.
So what is the best way to make your team as cohesive and bonded as possible? Team building is the only right answer to this question. And today, nothing can stop you from arranging action-packed and super effective team building games and exercises in the online space. Here are just a few examples of what you can do:
- Virtual corporate parties
- Multiplayer video games
- Online movie nights
- Thematic chat rooms
- Learning circles, etc.
Check out this post for even more online team building ideas to get inspiration from.
3. Promote collaboration and involve everyone in decision-making
Productive collaboration is the key to rapid problem-solving, innovation and high employee satisfaction. And true collaboration is only possible when you hear out your team members’ ideas and never discard them right away as something pointless.
Thus, find the time to discuss vital work-related matters with employees and engage them in an open and constructive dialog (during one-on-one calls or group chats). Evaluate the initiatives they offer and actually try out the promising ideas in practice. This will show your employees that you value their contributions to decision-making. It will help them feel more recognized, engaged and empowered at work.
4. Talk about career opportunities
What is more disappointing than the feeling of being stuck in one place with no prospects for growth and progress? As a leader, you have the power to prevent your employees from experiencing such frustration by talking about career opportunities with them.
Having such conversations is simple, yet for better results, you need to get to know your team members at a human level, explore their interests and figure out what motivates them at work. Collaborate with your employees to develop individual career plans and you will help them perceive themselves as valuable parts of the team.
5. Provide regular feedback
Over 80% of employees consider feedback a necessary and positive thing and would like to receive it more often. By providing constructive feedback to your team members, you will help them realize their growth potential and give them a sense of direction. Feedback demonstrates that you care for everything your employees do. Thereby, it serves as a vital relationship-building tool.
6. Be a trustworthy leader
Leadership is an intrinsic part of workplace culture. The way leaders and managers interact with employees sets the tone for a large chunk of social life in the company, defines everyone’s attitudes and manners of expression. Hence, to establish a positive, comfortable and motivating culture, a leader needs to inspire trust and also trust others.
Here are some things you should pay attention to in order to become trustworthy as a leader:
- Demonstrate competence and invest time in self-development
- Enhance your communication skills and always express yourself with clarity
- Show transparency in decision-making
- Stay open and welcome feedback from employees
- Display empathy and practice active listening
- Know how to control your emotions well
- Prioritize respect and honesty in relationships with colleagues
- Be reliable, responsible and accountable for everything you do
- Support your team members on a daily basis, etc.
7. Trust your employees
Remember that even if you succeed in mastering all the above, you won’t go far without the capacity to trust others. And to cultivate it, you need to adopt the right management practices, tools and overall attitudes.
First of all, it’s essential to make sure that every employee stays on the same page and is aware of what’s expected of them. For this purpose, a leader should focus on promoting the shared understanding of short-term objectives and long-term strategic goals.
However, the most important thing here is to be able to count on your team. Hence, it’s dangerous to keep track of everything that your remote employees do during the day, take screenshots of their workstations and scrutinize their online activity history. Micromanagement and strict control can serve well merely in rare situations, such as training and work of very complex tasks. In all other cases, constant employee tracking only causes significant problems, making your team members fearful and dissatisfied.
Thus, avoid micromanagement at all costs and implement performance monitoring tools that allow building a culture of trust. A piece of software like actiTIME will let you stay in the know of everything your remote workers do daily and weekly. It will enable you to see how employees utilize their time without intruding on their personal space and compromising your relationships with them.
8. Make employee well-being a priority
Besides going through the loss of connections with colleagues, many remote employees are prone to having a poor work-life balance, which is as bad for their mental health as social isolation. Addressing these remote work challenges through the culture of caring is pivotal for every business because they are damaging to team members’ lives and the whole organization’s productivity and performance.
One of the best ways to promote remote employee well-being is by embracing flexibility in terms of scheduling and time off management. It will give your team members a greater sense of control over their time and will let them attend to their personal needs with more ease.
Additionally, provide your remote workers with enough opportunities to socialize online and supply them with necessary mental health resources. You may even design an Employee Assistance Program to better help your workers cope with psychological issues and adverse life events. Doing all that is the best demonstration of care and empathy for your team members. Focusing on remote employees’ well-being is a sure way to establish lasting and productive professional relationships with them while also improving business outcomes.
9. Develop a clear remote work policy
A well-developed remote work policy informs employees about all the performance standards they should strive to meet. It documents all the norms adopted in your company and indicates which benefits your staff members are entitled to. Thereby, a remote work policy helps consolidate and formalize the organizational culture, making it much easier to comprehend and exercise in reality.
Some of the things you might cover in your own remote work policy are as follows:
- How many hours a day should employees work?
- When do they have to be online?
- Is there a schedule they must adhere to?
- Will you cover your remote employees’ technological needs?
- Will you provide them with training opportunities?
- How should your employees protect organizational data and what will follow if they fail?
Answer these questions fully and clearly and check out this post to see what else you can mention in your remote work policy to make it complete.
10. Stay flexible
A once-established remote work culture doesn’t have to stay the same for ages. The world around us is in the process of constant change. Hence, the preferences and interests of your business and your workforce will be constantly changing too.
Listen to what your employees like and need. Align their wants with your business goals and modify your remote work culture in a way that satisfies both. That’s how you’ll be able to keep your work environment sound and appealing to the best of talents. You will increase employee satisfaction and boost team productivity so that achieving greater business success won’t be a trouble at all.
