Keeping Culture While Employees Go Remote
As remote work grows in popularity, the need for keeping individuals in-tune and engaged in the company culture increases substantially.
Garrett Mintz
, Mon 6 April 2020
As remote work grows in popularity, the need for keeping individuals in-tune and engaged in the company culture increases substantially.
Remote work removes many of the inconveniences associated with going into work like commutes and distractions, but it takes away a key component to what makes company culture…connection!
This article serves to show a key way companies can go about maintaining and even improving the level of connectivity between employees as their work location becomes remote.
Before jumping into suggestions on maintaining and growing connectivity of employees as their work location becomes remote, let’s observe how employees connect in an office environment.
In our research on facilitating horizontal mentoring relationships for employees, we have learned that 68% of engaged employees that don’t work remotely believe that there are communication barriers between them and other employees. This is a critical statistic because this shows that even engaged employees feel that they are silo’d off from other employees, even if they work in the same office.
Reframing this point, most people don’t know what their counterparts in other departments do for their work and the conversations they do have are typically superficial (e.g. sports, weather, fashion, family).
As more people begin to work remotely, this is going to get worse because employees are going to lose the little interaction they do have with each other. All communication is going to be work related and the emotional identity employees have of being a member of the company will soon fade.
Just to be clear, the emotional identity employees have of being a member of the company is the company’s culture! Once that is gone, there is no more culture!
One key to keeping remote employees engaged in the culture of the company is to set aside time for employees to have intentional conversations with each other.
These conversations are not superficial while also not completely about work. These conversations are free from the workplace hierarchy (e.g. title has nothing to do with what is and isn’t shared in these conversations). These conversations provide a platform for employees to share what they are working on with another employee, learn obstacles the other person is facing, ask clarifying questions that they don’t normally ask or get asked, and identify ways to find breakthroughs at work – emotionally, operationally, mentally, or physically.
These relationships create empathy between employees. These relationships breakthrough communication barriers between employees. These relationships build a greater sense of identity employees have with the company.
This is called horizontal mentorship.
Optimal horizontal mentorship means:
· Pairing employees together based on shared Work Orientation – or their shared workplace value system.
· Providing meeting agendas to drive the conversations towards building rapport and being vulnerable.
· Collecting feedback and learning what tangible outcomes were created every few months from meeting.
· Switching mentor pairings every 6-12 months to continually build a web of connection between employees.
· Everyone participating is willing to be open-minded enough to learn from somebody else regardless of their age or experience, willing to ask questions, and willing to share past mistakes.
When horizontal mentorship is implemented optimally, all employees, especially remote employees, feel a greater level of connectivity and identity with their company.
