Admittedly, it is not as easy for an organization to grow a company culture or facilitate relationships between coworkers when so many of their employees work from home. However, with flexibility and the ability to offer a job to the best talent regardless of location, downsides come in feelings of isolation, potential gaps in communication, and reduced community. But with just a little strategic thinking, there is no reason even highly dispersed workers cannot join such a living, connected work culture.
Remote Working: The Importance of Employee Connection
A strong employee culture is important in developing collaboration, productivity, and job satisfaction. Moreover, interactions naturally occur in office environments through casual conversations, team lunches, and impromptu brainstorming sessions. The more these little interactions take place, the larger the building of relationships and a sense of belonging among employees. Working remotely requires making conscious attempts to replicate these, ensuring powerful connections are continually maintained among members.
If otherwise, such attention to culture could finally make remote workers feel excluded from the rest of their organization—this is bound to result in low morale, engagement, or high turnover. Therefore, it is highly important that the employees be valued and felt as part of an integrated team for long-run success when working remotely.
Strategies to Stay Connected
Encourage Open Communication
Good communication is at the foundation of any remotely working group. Use a variety of tools: video conferencing, instant messaging, and project management platforms among others that ensure there are several channels through which your employees connect and collaborate. Make sure to have your employees checked in with, regularly—both one-on-one and in group settings—so that lines of communication remain open, giving them space to voice their concerns, share ideas, and be heard.
Not less important is the stimulation of informal communications. Virtual spaces for employees include time spent in conversations unrelated to work—a virtual water cooler. This can be time to update personally, celebrate wins, and even chit-chat about life, mundane or otherwise, on a given chat channel.
Prioritize Team-Building Activities
Remote teams do not get to enjoy in-person bonding, and that just does not mean team-building should disappear. So schedule some virtual team-building activities that are secondary to in-person events—games online, trivia, or even cooking classes that allow camaraderie and employees to get to know each other personally. Such virtual events have torn down the barriers and created a sense of community despite the distances.
And finally, if possible, make sure to host regular face-to-face meetings or retreats. There is just something in the deepening of relationships and the reinforcing of company culture with face-to-face meetings that sometimes does not come through quite as well virtually.
Celebrate Achievements and Success
By acknowledging each employee as an individual and their contributions and major milestones, they feel part of a team. When people aren’t colocated, their achievements may go unnoticed. Make sure to call these small and big milestones—like work anniversaries, projects completed, or personal victories—to attention in front of the whole company through team meetings or noisy announcements.
The culture of recognition will make employees feel valued and recognized, and naturally, their bonding will grow stronger with the team and the organization.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
Allowing flexibility gives employees greater control in managing their time; however, at the same time, it may also blur the line between work and personal life. The promotion of a healthy work-life balance indicates that the company genuinely cares about the employees’ well-being. Leaders should role-model in respect of the boundaries of employees, setting clear expectations around working hours, and encouraging time off when needed.
Flexible policies, by conveying personal responsibility and preference, help to build an enabling culture of trust in which loyalty and close relationships can blossom.
Outline a Robust Onboarding Process
Onboarding is especially difficult when working within a completely remote setup. Virtual introductions, mentor schemes, and proper training in an onboarding process all cause a new employee to feel attached from day one. Give them a clear route to meeting the other employees and learning about the values of the company, and it will fast-track them through the process of belonging.
Virtual employee culture will take quite some conscious effort to breed but is worth it. Encourage open communication, invest in team bonding activities, celebrate success, promote work-life balance, and have a thorough onboarding process—and an organization will have created a diverse, inclusive, connected culture from a distance. While virtual working is here to stay, those businesses most willing to adapt and invest in their people and culture are best set up to thrive over the long term.
