Many businesses underestimate the value of strong company culture. Shared behaviors, values, and goals define an organization and become valuable intangible assets. To understand why we first have to think about the roles that organizational culture can play.
From a recruitment and HR perspective, a positive company culture helps you attract and retain top talent. Firms have understood this for decades. It has been one of the main drivers behind the focus on organizational culture since the 1950s. However, culture can also be a marketable asset.
In both B2C and B2B contexts, ethics now enters into purchase decisions more than ever. Consumers and businesses alike want to know all there is to know about who they’re buying from, including the company’s values, how employees are treated, and how employees behave in turn. So it’s important to communicate your culture to potential customers, too.
So let’s look at five ideas for how you can achieve exactly that. We’ll start with the basics in terms of refining and planning your company culture, then move on to address ways you can ensure it is communicated effectively throughout the organization’s remote teams and remains a focus moving forwards.
Instilling a positive company culture into remote teams is more challenging than in a conventional office environment. With the rise of remote and flexible working, it’s important that business leaders seek out new ways to nurture a positive organizational culture across all teams.
1. Revisit Your Firm’s Values, Goals, and Mission
The first step towards building a positive company culture is to refine your values, goals, and mission. You may already have documentation to explain this. But it’s worth refining your core ideas before you communicate them widely. Think about how your company is currently perceived and what you’d like to change, then put this down in writing.
To ensure everyone is on board, run idea sessions where you test out your ideas with representative members from each part of the business. Listening to your employees and incorporating their values into those of the organization is the best way to create unity and cohesion.
2. Communicate Your Company’s Culture
It can be difficult to ensure every employee understands what you’re trying to achieve with the company’s culture. Once you’ve created official documents that outline your values and mission statement, make them easily accessible to everyone via your intranet and website, and signpost this to new staff.
3. Aim for Maximum Transparency
Companies that are known for their strong cultures are often very transparent with their employees. As an established business, your pay and position structure should be well-defined and made available to every staff member. Everyone should be clear on what they have to work towards to be promoted and the salary they could earn.
4. Encourage Video Calls
When your staff is working from home, they can quickly become disconnected from what’s going on within the business, losing sight of shared goals and values. One way to get around this is to invest in video call software and encourage managers to get regular face time with their teams. This will keep morale up and ensure that everyone feels valued while also preventing the miscommunication of messages that can happen via email.
5. Make Time for Social Activities
Remote teams lose out on some benefits of working in an office. It’s much easier to create a positive culture when employees can hold face-to-face meetings, be social in breakout areas, and bounce ideas off the people sitting next to them.
But you can recreate this when working from home by scheduling some time for fun activities such as a quiz session or social hour via video call. You might be surprised by the positive effect this can have both on the organizational culture and productivity.
Hopefully, we’ve given you some ideas for creating and maintaining a strong company culture across your remote teams. Even if you put just one of these techniques into practice, you’ll be on the way to building a business that employees love working for and customers feel great buying from.
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If you have ideas that you feel like sharing that might be helpful to readers, share them in the comments section below. Thanks!
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