Throughout the globe, most of the businesses that have gone remote during the pandemic are experiencing newfound challenges with their remote workforce. It is not just the operations, or their bottom lines, that have been thrown into chaos. The human resource and leadership team is under stress when it comes to maintaining and growing the company cultures.

Employees are continuing to work remotely from home or a combination of in-person and remote working . Instilling and maintaining a sense of the company’s culture is a tough call.  The focus has now shifted more towards fostering the company culture for both existing and new talents.

On the contrary, such an unprecedented situation can be a good catalyst for fostering corporate cultures. Here’s how to win on corporate cultures during remote working :

Personal Check-Ins

Maintaining and growing corporate culture during a period of severe disruption often requires more frequent check-ins with employees, both individually and in small groups. The important factor is that these, check-ins must go beyond work deliverables. It should be focused on purely employees’ safety and emotional well-being, as well as their status on coping with the remote working.

Connections Building

Leaders and managers need to focus on how to encourage informal connections among team members. As the regular communal coffee breaks are no longer possible in person, new and digital ways of informal connections building are required. After all, informal connections build communication and trust. Providing opportunities for new employees to connect with an existing one, such as smaller virtual pods where newer team members gather knowledge from across the company, can help to reinforce the corporate culture.

Positive Catalyst for Change

Change What Needs to Be Changed. It is a challenging time for business, and it can also be a great opportunity and a good catalyst to change the culture. Previously, by default people had to go to the office. Now the default is, ‘work from home, no need to go to the office’. Allowing employees to freely work from anywhere and anytime, can work as a positive catalyst for developing a flexible and positive culture.

Training on reinforcing the culture

In many companies, managers and leaders have never faced such a situation where team members had to work entirely remote for more than a year. The human resource department needs to step up its game and provide training ( either internally or externally ) to train the supervisors, monitor their progress and ensure it’s sustained.  Adding training on how to acclimate to the current situation of the company will ensure the culture sustained.

Virtual Mentoring

Hiring and onboarding new employees is always critical to employee and business success. It is even more challenging especially important during the coronavirus pandemic. Introducing a virtual mentoring program is where a new hire virtually shadows a mentor. This will help the new talent(s) to learn, adapt and grow in the company culture faster and sustainably. The critical factor about Virtual mentoring is that HR needs to ensure that the mentor is someone who is well respected in the organization is rich in institutional knowledge and has a large network of contacts.

In case your company is innovation-driven, leaders, managers have to work three times as hard to make sure that that culture continues in a virtual environment. This has to be done in collaboration with the internal human resources department and if needed with external support. At Oridoc, we are currently supporting several companies with this new way of working and excelling through remote working. If you want to brainstorm and generate new ideas on how to improve your company culture in times of remote working, reach out to us via the contact form. One of our consultants will get in touch with you at lightning speed ⚡ .