Your Organizational Culture Is Key In Maintaining Employee Engagement WFH
In the last couple of months, the nature of our workplace, the environment, the relationships, and behaviors have drastically changed and the magnitude of the shift to remote work is staggering. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many employees to start working from home. This has been a drastic transformation that has impacted everyone. The results in businesses adopting new processes, remote teams, and new technologies. There has been a meme circulating which perfectly captures the sentiment for change you may have seen:
Most organizations were most likely hoping, that, by now things would have returned to ‘normal.’ But, with Covid-19 very much still here, businesses are closed or their teams working from home. Working remotely from anywhere has become the new day-to-day norm and it appears it could be the case for quite some time.
Widespread remote work has created new challenges and it begs the question, how can leaders create the right conditions for employees to remain committed and engaged whilst working from home?
Employee engagement is important for a number of reasons; inspiring employees to contribute to the success and purpose of an organization, motivated to give their best each day, and being aligned with the goals and values of the company. But this all begins with leaders having the capacity to understand the well-being of their employees, as they can easily feel disconnected from their organizations working from home. The most effective step to battle potential disconnection would be frequent check-ins by leaders to see how their employees are doing personally and professionally.
Leaders are faced with the challenge of adopting new leadership and communication styles to reach and engage employees working from home permanently.
When done wrong, collaborative activities can feel time-consuming as team members spend more time talking and less time actually getting things done. When employees need to collaborate with other teams, working from home may decrease productivity. Acknowledging that productivity may dip at the beginning and letting employees know that it is ok, can be an effective short-term step. Longer term, however, organizations will need to evaluate the performance of remote workers in new and different ways.
But when employees are aligned to culture this creates a conducive working environment. The opposite negatively impacts the nature of superior and subordinate relationships causing reduced productivity.
Most organizations haven’t clearly defined their culture they risk it diminishing unless leaders take action to support it.
Leaders need to be aware of what makes their culture work. The habitual practices the core carriers of culture — the day-to-day activities of employees — colleagues interacting or making decisions.
Why is Culture Important?
Culture is influential and transcends an organization it is the reason why staff want to work for companies, it’s why they stay. Culture is as important as a business strategy. However “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, as Peter Drucker famously said. That is not to mean strategy isn’t important — rather culture is a surer route to success. Maintaining a positive culture is vital because;
Culture boosts performance.
An organization with a strong culture will most likely outperform its competitors.
Increases happiness.
Deloitte’s 2016 survey indicates that positive workplace culture improves overall satisfaction and happiness in an organization.
Improves employee retention rate. Salary alone isn’t enough to retain an employee. How many times have you ever heard or witnessed a person quit a high paying position and settle for way less income because it makes them happy? Most likely, more than once.
Encourages positive recruitment. An organization with a positive culture will attract more authentic employees ready to execute their tasks wholeheartedly.
How to Define Great Organizational Culture
A lot of change and disruption is happening in the world today. Most organizations were hoping to return to ‘normality’ soon. But, unfortunately, it might take a while before we go back to the way things were, if ever. Even when the time comes, and people return to office buildings, so much will have changed physically and socially.
Nevertheless, there are things that leaders can do to ensure the culture is upheld.
Trust
Today, there is very little trust in the workplace. Leaders don’t necessarily trust employees to do the right thing without supervision. On the other hand, employees don’t trust leaders to have their best interests at heart.
This puts the whole superior-subordinate engagement at a standstill. Therefore, leaders need to let go of some control. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they should step aside and drop all their managerial duties. Instead, they should learn how to build trust that employees will do the right thing, even with minimal supervision.
With that in mind, employees will start viewing leaders more than people who blindly push them around for their own benefit.
Make Culture Visible Through Organizational Practices
Organizational culture is most certainly not a new concept. But, culture is often obscured. Therefore, organizations should openly teach employees the cultural habits of the organization.
For example, they can hold regular training and team building activities. An organization can also educate all recruits about how they relate with one another, their values and beliefs.
Whether or not an organizational culture is enacted is determined by the employees’ practices. Since people are now working remotely, it is hard for leaders to monitor employees’ practices. Now more than ever, they need to be vocal and acknowledge workplace culture and teach subordinates what is expected of them according to the organization’s character and unwritten rules.
Effective Working
As mentioned earlier, working from home is the new normal. For the better part of 2020, people have worked remotely, and organizations have managed to stay afloat. This shows that employees can produce better work results regardless of whether they are working at home or in office buildings.
When it comes to work-life balance, remote work poses a paradox. On the one hand, working from home cuts down on commuting/travelling time and allows people to adjust their schedules and spend more time with their families. On the other hand, remote work can leave employees feeling like they must be available 24–7 and work more hours, and it can blur the boundary between their professional and personal lives. When remote work is mandatory and schools and day care facilities are potentially closed, it is, of course, even harder to maintain the boundary between work and professional life.
Regardless, results from CNBC|Survey Monkey Workforce Survey show, remote workers have an approximate Workforce Happiness Index score of 75 out of 100. These findings are higher than those of people working at workplaces, which was only 71 out of 100. From this, it is clear that employees would function better when given a mix of the two.
One of the easier ways to help employees manage work-life balance, is making allowances for them to adjust their schedules to accommodate personal obligations.
Adopt Modifications To The Current Cultural Practices
It is only fair to modify various organizational cultures since workforces are now scattered in different locations. From the native definition of culture, beliefs and practices are supposed to be flexible and accommodative to additional changes.
Institutions can adjust the current practices to be socially and an environment conducive for all employees. This will also create room for inclusivity, thus making everyone in an organization feel appreciated and valued.
Changing the workplace culture will also help employers benefit from effective workers. When employees have fulfilling and rewarding work conditions, it boosts their productivity. Increased productivity equals higher work outputs, which translates to more profits.
However, abrupt changes in workplaces may undermine current practices. Leaders and employees should thread this line carefully to prevent further repercussions.
Communication
Working from home led to losing a significant amount of direct personal communication. Even though virtual communication is effective, it lacks the personal touch of face to face communication. Plus, there are numerous barriers when talking to someone online or via phone call. This may create further division between leaders and employees in an organization.
Therefore, leaders should quickly come up with ways of maintaining effective communication and key principles on how to communicate with remote and scattered teams.
A focus should be on frequent, transparent, part of a two-way conversation, easy to use, and consistent communication. Using a high level of frequency in communicating (also use unconventional methods like video or blog), explain decisions and clarify the rationale behind those choices, create ways to enable employees to give feedback and ask questions in real time, establish centralized information hubs to collect and provide relevant information, and make sure all communication is consistent across the entire organization and doesn’t create conflicting messaging.
Maintaining Employee Engagement
Employees are faced with the challenge of engaging their employees. Here are some tips to help employers and leaders maintain and increase employee engagement during these unprecedented times;
Uphold Organizational Culture
Employers and leaders should ensure they maintain the organizational culture. This will ensure that all practices are carried out to the latter. The tips highlighted above will guide you on the key aspects you should follow in maintaining your organization’s culture.
Facilitate Teamwork and Collaboration
An organization is a unit. Working together and collaboratively executing tasks will increase employees’ sense of belonging, purpose, loyalty, and meaning. When working virtually, it may not be easy to coordinate and work with colleagues on projects.
But, this is where technology comes into play. Encourage your employees to utilize technology continually. For example, a team working on a particular project should hold morning meetings to discuss the work they’ll do for the rest of the day. This will increase social support between employees and codependency in decision making.
Ensure Leaders Constantly Check-up on Employees
When everyone is working under the same roof, a manager can easily drop by for a face to face check-up whether they are working or lazing around. Unfortunately, this is impossible when employees are working remotely.
An organization can devise other methods to monitor the progress of employees. For instance, they can incorporate software that enables everyone to work from the same platform. If this is expensive, leaders can use communication channels to regularly check-up on employees.
Appreciate Employees
A little token of appreciation can go a long way. Acknowledge and commend employees when they do a job well done. Feedbacks expressing gratitude will boost their motivation and desire to outperform themselves.
For example, you can openly recognize an employee during a virtual meeting or offer monthly bonuses. According to Gallup’s analysis, employee recognition helps reinforce a company’s values and improve its performance and motivation.
Create Room for Recovery Time
Employees will experience higher engagement levels after a break. Plus, since people are working from home, they now more than ever spend more time in front of a computer. This reduces human interaction, which may lead to anxiety and low level of motivation.
Therefore, always give your employees recovery time to step away from a computer screen and engage in other activities. Also, encourage your employees to take breaks during the day. During these breaks, they can step outside for fresh air. It will keep them rejuvenated and decrease burnout or fatigue.
Culture plays a significant role in maintaining employee engagement. Leaders should therefore aim to empower employees to find balance office and working remotely to ensure that both the organization activities and employee engagement is maintained. Enabling colleagues to connect from time to time in-person will help boost relationships and foster company culture.
By doing so the organizations culture will improve trust, communication, effective working, and new working practices. Thus, addressing any of the factors above will help maintain employee engagement even while teams work from home.
One thing is definite, remote work is here to stay and will bring new challenges and opportunities. Organizations all over the world are experimenting with new practices to guide through the transition to a more distributed workforce. We are still in the early days, and it’s not yet clear which of these approaches will be sustainable. But we cannot afford to wait for definitive results — we need to act now to help employees and organizations feeling comfortable with shifting to remote work.
