You know remote workers are also on the rise. When these figures continue to increase, managers will be faced with a new problem: developing and sustaining a good remote work culture when the team is spread across a continent.
Why is remote work culture important?
Remote work culture is important because it affects how you are perceived by your employees and customers — and that greatly determines how successful your business is. Because remote teams are physically distant, the building of a culture is a bigger challenge, but the need to build a culture is even greater without in-person interactions. When an organization lives up to its core values, its community turns workers into champions, enriches their well-being, and ensures that the company maintains its best talent. And with the Covid-19 pandemic moving most of the world to operate overnight from home, it is more important now than ever to have a mechanism in place to create a remote work culture.
How to build remote work culture with workers?
The National Statistics Office last year estimated that half the UK workforce will be working remotely in 2020; and when the coronavirus pandemic hit the country, more and more companies were forced to adopt this way of working to comply with the lockdown limitations.
So, how do companies maintain a good remote work culture, even among teams that seldom or never meet each other?
Below are some tips from businesses that have made remote work a success, along with company psychologists, experts, and writers, in discovering the best ways to make remote teams function successfully – and happily.
Remote work culture is about how you perform –
Anyone who works at Bitsys Technology is under the impression that you are coming to work for the job, not for ping pong. Most of your working time is going to be work, so the work itself has to be rewarding. Examples include:
- How do we converse with customers? (is speed more important than quality?)
- How do we connect with each other? (is this a discussion over a phone call or an email or a chat?)
- How much overtime do you do? (We’re doing 40 or 80 hours?)
For remote businesses, those actions and principles build Remote Work Culture more than a ping pong table does, because our job is our lifeblood.
For meetings use videoconferencing –
Face-to-face meetings are important for the building of relationships. If you can, exploit offices during onboarding to get the teams together. Or, you can arrange off-site or conference meetings of regular teams in person. Here’s a tip – if your company is on tight budgets and can’t afford to host people in costly cities such as SF: schedule off-sites in a less costly metro. Only make the whole team meet and rent a meeting room for nearby co-workers. Daily video conferencing sessions using software such as Microsoft Teams are also a perfect way to synchronize the team regularly and build remote work culture.
Communicate your remote work culture –
Building a high-performing remote culture is much easier if everybody on the team shares the vision of the business. Settle in on a straightforward and succinct way to explain your mission, communicate it to your colleagues, and continue to improve the mission. This reminds people of how important it is what they are doing together.
Encourage an Open Communication and Feedback system –
Keeping your team communication channels clear and open will promote transparency while actually enabling the team communication that is so desperately needed by organizations.
You want to foster an environment in which everyone contributes and not just the loud extroverts among your team. Reduce any paperwork or formality associated with communication in order to avoid keeping workers silent, which is not safe for employees or the entire team.
The more casual and laid-back you are with team communication channels, typically the better they become when they are open and transparent, depending on the size of your team.
Know what to expect from your remote worker –
Business analysts suggest remote employees need to know what they’re capable of. These must be established before any remote operating arrangements begin.
For remote work, you must have very simple contractual frameworks in place. It may be dependent on time, results, effort, and outcomes – so make sure everyone knows what the deal is. You can work it out in the office over a coffee – not so if there are 1,000 miles between you.
Be mindful of the team’s psychology –
When you sit in the office every day beside a friend, it won’t take long to start learning a lot about them; without even trying, you begin to get a sense of who they are as a person, and what personality traits they have.
Once the team is remote this is more of a challenge. Make a point to learn about each of your employees or colleagues through suggest running a wide-ranging staff survey on favorite meals or films.
You may make this a game where everybody has to vote for their favorite character or the like of a movie. Fast, enjoyable events like this really help a remote team build a positive Remote Work Culture.
Support workers set their growth and development goals remotely –
If you’re working in a business that had a work-from-home policy prior to the COVID-19 pandemic or switching gears in the days of physical distance, many of your workers can still see their typical office-based job development for you.
Some dimensions of career development may also be symbolized by physical office features.
Employees chart their ideal career trajectory in a remote work environment or have a supervisor’s support. What steps do they take to advance? Which credentials will they be focused on?
To be fully happy, workers need to be able to envision where they are heading and what they see as well.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed a lot on how to create better communication, and while working with a dispersed or remote team, establish a collaborative work culture.
Armed with this new information, along with the tips, tricks, and links that I have provided, we trust you will feel more comfortable in your mission of building an energetic, successful, and profitable company with a remote staff team.
We wish you all the best of luck as you grow with a remote team into building your remote work culture.
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Remote work culture – how can you make it work? Read these valuable tips and insights and see how you could implement them at your own company.
