How to Spot Company Culture Problems During Remote Work

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How to Spot Company Culture Problems During Remote Work

Posted:

May 2, 2022

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Remote and flexible work is here to stay for most organisations. This has implications for company culture, regardless if you have five or 5,000 employees. As a manager or company leader, how are you meant to keep a finger on your team’s pulse when they are largely distributed? It’s no longer as easy to have a quick chat, observe body language or even just sense the ‘vibe’ of your office.

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Yet, people seek out and thrive in positive work cultures. It’s in your team’s best interest to build and maintain a good remote work culture, especially if your team is working from home for an extended period.

Signs that your company culture is beginning to degrade

A strong “Values Code” is an organisation’s North Star. If you have a good understanding of your core values, it becomes easier and quicker to spot the warning signs of employee disengagement or weakening company culture.

Here are a couple of indicators to look out for:

How to actively gauge company culture?

Apart from watching out for those indicators, which are often lagging, you can also proactively keep tabs on how people are feeling.

More frequent but shorter check-ins can help your team feel heard and get more comfortable communicating digitally. They can also serve as “pulse checks” and give you earlier indications of declining company culture.

This can also be done more formally through regular (short) surveys or giving people the chance to give feedback anonymously, and actively encouraging the practice.

How to encourage feedback?

Utilise your organisation’s communication tools to show your team the different ways they can remain connected, and most importantly, how communication channels with you remain open.

When talking to your team one on one, directly ask for their feedback, ensure you’re actively listening, and follow up on issues they may raise. If employees see that action results from their feedback, they are likely to be more encouraged to speak up again in future.

Setting aside time specifically for people to give feedback, for example, 10 minutes at the end of meetings can also help start building the habit of giving and receiving feedback.

Importantly, don’t forget to share positive feedback! Celebrating wins and sharing knowledge across your team goes a long way to helping people feel engaged and recognised.

Finally, if you do find that your team is struggling to adapt to remote work, it may not be amiss to ask for help from your human resources team or an external consultant to run a training session on communication, giving feedback or even work-from-home best practices.

At Lucida, we believe in hiring with empathy. Strong interpersonal relationships go a long way towards building successful teams and businesses. Want to discuss your remote work hiring strategy? Drop us a line at hello@lucida.io.

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