Preserving Company Culture in Remote Work: A Guide

In today’s day and age, a company’s culture is immensely important. It has become even more crucial in the form of remote work culture as more and more companies are adopting a hybrid work model or a work from home approach. As per a Glassdoor survey, nearly 56% of employees give more importance to a good work culture as compared to a high salary. Your company culture lies in the heart of the organization. To build the right company culture, you should know about striking the right balance between employee productivity and employee encouragement. 

It is typically a perfect mix of your business mission, goals, and values. While you cannot build it overnight, it can be enhanced with employee efforts, proper strategies from HR as well as leadership. In the following article, we will cover how to preserve a company’s remote work culture:

Maintaining company culture remotely: Best practices

Irrespective of your organization including remote workers or making the transition, company culture is essential to the success of your organization. You can include the following practices in your framework to foster a positive remote work culture:

Share values of your company

Company values play a very prominent role in creating a company culture. They act as the core pillars which guide your entity or organization. But, most companies lack in communicating these with the employees. They are important for creating a positive work environment as well as letting your employees know how the organization works. Here are some ways to ensure that you keep your company values intact in a remote work culture: 

• Incorporate the values of your organization since day one. Add these values to your website or show your employees a cultural video during the orientation.
• You can create a regular update telling your employees about how your work culture was incorporated into the regular workflow. These little examples can help your employees understand how to inculcate your company’s values in your remote work culture. It is very easy to know about the vision and mission of the company, but talking about how to add it to the core functionality of the organization.

Improve your communication internally

Company values play a very prominent role in creating a company culture. They act as the core pillars which guide your entity or organization. But, most companies lack in communicating these with the employees. They are important for creating a positive work environment as well as letting your employees know how the organization works. Here are some ways to ensure that you keep your company values intact in a remote work culture:

• Incorporate the values of your organization since day one. Add these values to your website or show your employees a cultural video during the orientation.
• You can create a regular update telling your employees about how your work culture was incorporated into the regular workflow. These little examples can help your employees understand how to inculcate your company’s values in daily work.

Keep face to face meetings

While we understand that the excitement of face-to-face meetings cannot be completely replaced with virtual alternatives, they are still important to build a remote work culture. 

Seeing and hearing people helps you facilitate better communication. Additionally, it helps develop camaraderie between people. Some of the ways to ensure this includes: 

• Weekly meet-ups are important. Ask your managers to designate time to talk to their employees individually and even have team meet-ups. This helps employees build trust, celebrate individual achievements, and make connections too.
• With work from home in the picture, most employees choose just to talk without a video on call. But, make video calls compulsory. This helps all employees to speak to each other and build a proper relationship.

Improve your remote meetings with team video call applications like nuovoteam so that there is no glitch in your connection. 

Establish initiatives that benefit the whole company

If you can create company-wide initiatives or build department-specific excursions, retreats, or even training seminars, it will help a lot in maintaining your remote work culture. You can hold regular initiatives throughout the whole year to keep the spirit high. You can bring people from different locations and departments in virtual meet-ups too so that people are acquainted with each other. Here are some pointers to remember: 

• Hold meetings involving everybody. Update your entire organization about important milestones and events. You can create a community and keep everybody in the loop.
• You can even organize events like hosting trivia nights, a work-from-home bingo, or monthly virtual meet-ups.
• Whenever it is safe, you can organize company retreats as well. Bring everyone together either in person, once, or twice annually.

Key takeaways:

When it comes to remote work culture, you need to take extra steps to develop a strong one. In an ideal company culture, employees feel quite empowered and trusted to fulfill their work. It is a process that requires continual hard work, time, and patience. When a company adds a new remote team or transitions into going remote, the HR needs to be well equipped to address the problems that come along with it. With the above-mentioned practices, you can set a basis for remote work culture.