8 Ways Employers Can Cultivate An Effective Culture for Remote Workers
Over 40.7 million Americans are expected to be fully remote in the next five years, according to Upwork’s “Future of Workforce Report.” As this number of remote workers increases, one of your key goals as an employer should be maintaining your company culture—and the transition to remote work doesn’t have to change this dynamic.
An analysis of Culture 500 companies published by MITSloan Management Review in Q4 2020 revealed that companies that had strong workplace cultures outperformed their competition. Employees of Culture 500 companies gave their corporate leaders much higher marks in terms of communication, employee welfare, and ability to adapt to change quickly and easily during the first six months of 2020 compared with the preceding year.
As we round out yet another year, maintaining company culture will continue to be imperative for helping employees feel connected and protected.
Your senior leadership, managers, and organization as a whole play essential roles in reinforcing your company culture, while remote working remains the new standard. With proper motivation, your employees can help you reinforce the culture, too.
Here are 8 ways you can improve and cultivate a positive culture for remote employees.
1. Establish Clear Expectations
Communicate your remote work policy and create a framework so that employees know what to expect and what their responsibilities are. Make trust and tradition a priority, but be adaptable.
Remote work can mean a lot of different things to different people. While some corporate leaders expect updates from each team on a daily basis, others may be satisfied with a weekly briefing. Being as specific and explicit as possible about your organization’s policies will help your employees know exactly what to expect and what is required of them, which builds both synchronicity and company culture.
2. Foster Strong Communication
When creating a healthy remote work company culture, it’s important to reinforce the significance of effective and thorough communication of all the high-level decisions with your team. Consistent exchange of information shows employees that you trust them completely to handle their work, even when they are working remotely. Most importantly, you have to remember that trust is a two-way street and your employees will only trust you when you trust them.
Encourage your team members to be transparent when situations arise and foster an environment of trust where employees feel safe from reprimand when they have to make judgment calls between work and life priorities. Transparent communication is critical for maintaining your culture while employees are working remotely. Employees need to trust you, especially during a crisis when job security is likely one of their top concerns.
3. Provide Resources For Team Members To Work Remotely Effectively
The long-term success of remote work depends on whether you’re using the right tools to manage work. The ideal software for remote work is a digital workplace platform where teams can collaborate, communicate and accomplish work within a unified virtual space.
Productivity and communication tools, for example, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, and collaborative team communication platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, Workplace from Meta, and Quip can allow your group to interact effectively without multiple, back-to-back conference calls/meetings via Zoom or other similar programs. When employees and managers are aware of the day-to-day work activities of their team members through workflow and communication tools, you can keep micromanagement to a minimum and use that knowledge to reinforce trust.
Although there is no true replacement for meeting your team members directly, a regular schedule of video calls can help close the communication gap and help employees re-establish a sense of normalcy. Team managers should hold regular 1:1 meetings with the employees to build better connections, establish trust, and celebrate their individual accomplishments.
Another option to expand and create connections would be to encourage team members to switch on their videos during team meetings to reinforce values through direct face-to-face communication. However, it’s best to use discretion here, as turning on video as a requirement can be alienating from a home demographic standpoint. Additionally, too many video calls can cause screen fatigue which can lead to the opposite effect.
4. Provide Mentors & Accountability Partners
Another useful tool in remote work environments is creating functional teams with built-in accountability partners. Pairing newer employees with seasoned team members can help tremendously with onboarding new hires and help them transition effectively into the culture of your organization, their new roles and responsibilities.
If you have the bandwidth, it would also be a value add if you can create a mentorship dynamic within your onboarding and training/post-training process.
Additionally, having that extra layer between employees and management provides more resources and opportunities for managing workloads, troubleshooting issues and keeping lines of communication open throughout the organization.
5. Enhance Work-Life Balance & Flexibility
In remote workforce settings, paying attention to your employees’ work-life dynamics can heavily reinforce your organizational culture of caring and prioritizing your most valuable resource, human capital. Human capital refers to the skills and expertise that allows workers to do their job more effectively and efficiently.
For instance, if you have the capability to provide child care support for working parents, establishing more flexible leave policies, and/or offering virtual social activities will reinforce an optimized experience for your employees. You can also acknowledge the challenges that team members experience in their remote settings, by scheduling meetings and interaction time during a core period of hours and respecting family time in mornings and evenings.
6. Establish Growth & Development Career Tracks
Career growth and development is important to keep employees engaged and optimistic about their futures and their prospects. By providing a potential roadmap for employees to forecast their career and potential earnings growth, you empower your team to set goals and benchmarks to work towards and further buy in to your organizational culture and goals.
If you foster an environment of merit-based achievement and rewards for dedication and hard work, you will create a company culture that prioritizes excellence and the growth of its personnel.
7. Prioritize Mental Health
When you pay attention to employee work-life balance issues, you must do more to promote the positive mental health of your remote workers. Organizations can help combat these mental health issues using the same methodologies recommended to reinforce their culture of caring, empathy, consideration, and gratitude. Encourage workers to utilize Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), check in frequently on how they are doing, and allow them to take mental health days for rest and relaxation when they feel they need time to regroup.
8. Collect Feedback & Make Adjustments As Needed
For managers pioneering a remote or hybrid team and establishing a remote work culture, understand that you won’t get everything exactly right the first time. Nonetheless, do not be discouraged, because everyone involved is also learning and contributing to the two-way development of the culture and environment that is most ideal and balanced.
It is always a good idea to ask remote employees for their feedback regularly so that you can understand what’s working for them and what isn’t. It will also help you continuously improve the process for future hires as well.
Remote Work Culture Is An Ever-Evolving Ecosystem
The process of developing a strong culture where all of your employees, regardless of their working location, feel trusted and empowered to perform their best work is an ongoing process that requires a lot of time and hard work.
Whether you are transitioning your entire organization to remote work or adding a new remote team, you will need to be equipped with all the best practices and tools to make the shift as smooth as possible for your employees. Take this one step at a time!
So, what are your immediate steps?
Identify or build upon your organizational culture.
Foster transparency in order to create an environment of trust so that your organization can continuously keep moving forward.
AND — Continue to pioneer and implement changes that benefit your organization while keeping your human capital at the forefront of your operations.
