When the COVID-19 pandemic intensified in 2020, many organizations shifted to working remotely due to the movement restrictions put by different countries. The new normal has benefited many industries, although unity and a robust organizational culture remain significant challenges.
The success of any company, whether working remotely or physically, critically relies on its organizational culture. A positive and strong culture attracts reliable investors, more customers, and unmatchable talents hence retaining the existing employees.
Building a strong culture with remote team members can be pretty challenging, but the ideas below will help you reinforce what you have already started. Let’s learn how you can build a strong culture with your remote team:
Digital Workplace Solution
Thanks to advancing technology, everything globally is going digital, including working remotely for organizations. A digital workplace solution is the modernized version of the traditional office setup, where responsibilities are undertaken through advanced technologies and applications.
An organization can build a strong culture with its remote team by adapting digital workplace solutions, including providing essential communication tools and channels. Additionally, it can secure the information shared across its members with high-security applications and offer enough storage for its data.
Other digital workplace solutions for remote teams provide reliable means of collecting data and having responsible managers to ensure the built culture maintains its roots.
Develop a Team Culture and Keep Updating It
Building a strong culture starts with the company defining the specific culture, sharing it among its remote team members, and updating it regularly to keep them on track. Company culture can be explained through word of mouth or a document that can be retrieved whenever needed.
Standard company cultures should include a brief story about its creation, mission (within a stipulated period), vision, goals, values, and communication regulations. The company culture should be made public to every team member to encourage them to create a stronger one.
Work With Collaboration Tools
Good communication remains vital for all organizations to succeed physically or remotely. Initially, it was a heavy burden for remotely working teams until experts developed reliable collaboration tools.
The tools enable team members to communicate with each other efficiently and stay connected, so they can achieve their goals and minimize related drawbacks. Some examples of reliable collaboration tools for remote teams include Slack, GoTo Meeting, Asana, Trello, Google, WebEx, Igloo, and Gmail.
Provision of Career Development and Enhancement Opportunities
A remotely working organization can better its culture by offering its team members opportunities to enhance their careers and personal lives. If a company wants a stronger version of what it has, it should strengthen its existing players for better results.
Several organizations provide career development and expansion opportunities to their remote team members. Thus, they provide financial support for those wishing to undertake various courses and host regular learning sessions to instill knowledge and skills in them regarding multiple activities.
Embrace Team-Building Activities
It’s natural to feel isolated in the office, especially when working remotely. Employees who are not motivated or charged will likely get reluctant along the way and not perform as anticipated. Therefore, the managers and other team leaders should develop regular team-building sessions for their players to socialize away from the usual office duties.
The sessions also strengthen general relationships in the organization, fueling the process of achieving a stronger culture. Some team-building activities include virtual coffee breaks, monthly movie nights, friendly competitions, and Friday snack attacks.
Build a Reliable Feedback System
Another way of building a more robust culture in a remote team is creating a reliable feedback mechanism. Feedback is essential for every organization as it allows for improvement and increases team member-team leader engagement.
It’s the only way your employees will feel acknowledged for their extra efforts and motivated to do better for the missed targets. A reliable feedback system is a foundation for a more substantial work culture in a remote team.
Practice Healthy Rewarding Routines
Who doesn’t like being rewarded? You can regularly acknowledge and praise your team members through spoken words, but an actual gift performs magic. An organization can build a strong culture by practicing good rewarding habits for employees who exceed expectations. They can also recognize those who strived to improve and those with a consistent performance record.
For more outstanding results, rewarding should be undertaken after a reasonable period that allows team leaders to evaluate their team member’s performance. Furthermore, honesty, fairness, and transparency should be considered when determining the winners from different departments.
Undertake Weekly Virtual Meetings
Lastly, a remotely working organization can create a better and stronger culture by holding weekly or bi-weekly virtual meetings with team members from different departments. The team leaders should introduce the weekly meetings, settle for a specific day (or rotate across the days) with their members, and strictly adhere to the agreed plans.
Weekly virtual meetings offer employees opportunities to ask questions while the leaders provide feedback on the performance of the previous week(s).
