Workplace culture isn't just about cookies and free coffee. It is a rather important aspect of organizing the environment and conditions in which people can stay motivated and creative. And remote work company culture is equally important.
To build a great team at a distance, you need to analyze the connection between employees, their teamwork traits, and try to see what contributes to their common productivity. Let us share our take on how to build a strong company culture and why it is so important.
Why is Workplace Culture so Important?
The way employees and customers speak of a company directly affect one’s market success. In a remote work environment, building a strong team culture is more difficult, but even more necessary if compared to traditional office management practice. All in all, working without personal contact requires more management and organizational skills.
The company's investment in remote team culture makes employees feel needed. When an employer invests in the development and welfare of the staff, there is no need for people to start looking for alternatives. This ultimately helps retain talents and build a professional team that is ready to work for a common result.
In 2020, many companies were forced to switch to a telecommuting business model (the team of Axisbits is not an exception). According to Google data, mobility trends fell by 30% compared to baseline. At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak alone, back in March, the global interest in remote work grew by 15% compared to December 2019.
In the following years, top managers will surely be concerned with the question of how to build a strong company culture, given the remote format of work. Let’s take a closer look at arising tendencies.
How to Improve Company Culture?
The office culture is usually built with the help of joint corporate parties, training sessions, and team activities. But how to develop remote team culture? This will require more awareness and action. At Axisbits, we are gradually continuing to build a remote work company culture ourselves. Let us share some pro tips.
Pick a centralized communication hub
The so-called virtual office is essential. With profiled software we have today, the only major downside of such solutions is that there is no coffee machine and lunch table. However, this is where random content comes in as a replacement.
You can draw stickers with the top phrases of employees or use GIFs. If you have a large company, create chats, for instance, in Slack, according to topics. You can also host online Zoom parties on Fridays. Or come up with a quiz of some sort.
Note that a regular messenger wouldn’t be enough if you have a 20+ employee company. It’s best to pick a platform with a user-friendly interface that lets users exchange and manage documents and media, integrate tools (such as Google Docs, Gmail, etc.), and such.
Focus on productivity
The volume and quality of work are much more important than the employee’s online presence throughout the workday. Shifting your focus to clean productivity is about motivating an employee to do more per unit of time. When the employee gets enough freedom of work decision, they can manage his/her resources better.
He/she becomes motivated to do faster and better, and not to postpone difficult tasks for later. A person adjusts their work routine to personal qualities. Everybody has their most productive hours when they complete tasks with minimal or no edits.
The flexibility in the schedule has made our employees much more productive. And some, having switched to a remote format, opened up in a new way. It's worth starting to practice flexible schedules by setting deadlines and “deadlines for deadlines”. This principle builds a trusting relationship between the company and the employee: people will help out on weekends or close the task outside of working hours.
Have a mission statement
A well-composed and promoted business mission helps a lot in building a strong team culture. Every Axisbits employee knows the common purpose while working on the project because our management isn’t shy to talk about it out loud. All decisions made in the company should be based on the bigger mission. “What’s it all for?” is a question to be asked every day. Why are you doing this, why are you doing it this way and not otherwise?
Trust your team
A person spends a third of his life at work. It is not for nothing that many call their work colleagues a second family. In a trusty team, emphasizing who’s boss and who’s a subordinate is never a good idea. Trust the team. Everyone has their own responsibilities and works for the common success of the business. You will be surprised at how much more dedicated employees become when they feel trusted and respected.
Conduct antizoom parties
Meeting up with everybody from home, wearing a robe and slippers is great. However, live meetups are integral to throw (when the quarantine conditions allow it, of course). At Axisbits, we throw corporate parties from time to time, which always helps to build a strong team culture.
Company Culture Assessment Tools
Now that we figured out how to improve company culture, let's talk about how to measure its effectiveness. In general, you need to assess progress: whether your actions lead to results or not.
For a general understanding of efficiency, the individual indicators of the behavior of each employee are taken into account. Consider measuring the transformation of the corporate culture based on the following model: training, knowledge, application, behavior change, culture transformation, business impact.
- Indicate the state of culture at hand. In order to reach point B, one must first analyze point A and build a route. Introduce regular surveys on the topic of corporate culture changes. This will help you assess the impact of your efforts.
- Draw up a clear portrait of the perfect remote work company culture. Compose an 18-36-month plan where the fundamental milestones are captured.
- Use mobile tools. Corporate culture boosting efforts must be regular. Brief SMS messages and notifications can remind employees about the main work efficiency, productivity, and quality aspects.
- Check the knowledge. If people don’t understand where and for what everything is moving, there won’t be any new results. Qualification exams will help how well an employee perceived the training and whether you should provide any additional courses.
- Introduce a rating. You can create a form where employees would be able to rate certain corporate aspects.
Global changes in corporate culture is a regular work of each of the participants in the process. Even after an inspiring seminar, the fuse disappears and the employee returns to the usual behavior scenario. Especially when no work is being done from other channels. However, regular action creates a new culture.
Bottom Line
We believe that the recipes for building a strong team culture from Axisbits will help your company, as they helped us. COVID-19 and quarantine measures around the world have shown that businesses can be built differently. And no less effectively.
The fact remains - it’s difficult to achieve success without a built remote team culture in this day and age. It is as important as product development, implementation, and marketing. Create a culture that you can be proud of and that will definitely bring success.
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