An effective remote workforce results when an organization fosters a positive company culture. Your leadership group’s ability to promote a unique cultural environment can increase your remote team’s productivity. Implementing guidelines covering how remote employees should perform to be successful within your organizational culture helps achieve company goals. Because remote employees work far from each other, they benefit from feedback and motivational reminders during team interactions.
Have a Set of Values & Expectations
Organizational culture develops through core values and a top-down application approach. To foster remote stable workforce norms, your employees need to understand what’s expected of them. Defining between three and five core values gives your remote team an easy-to-follow blueprint on how to succeed.
Your remote team will find it easier to adhere to your company’s core values if the leadership group embeds them into daily routines and digital communications. A company handbook can help outline the performance norms that employees must abide by to maintain their work-at-home privileges. When you communicate performance expectations clearly, your employees can learn how to succeed.
The key to building a robust remote work culture is demonstrating how to interact effectively despite working from different locations. Virtual meetings could include a system that allows all attendees to participate and respond to a leader’s questions. With team members spread across distances, it’s crucial to create values that prevent different backgrounds or previous companies’ cultural differences from clashing with the currently assembled group.
Lead by Example
An active and present leadership team sets the example that shapes a professional remote environment. By reinforcing core values through a consistent communication strategy, leadership can demonstrate how to interact remotely. The company’s core values and performance standards should reflect a behavioral model aligned with the organization’s strategy and goals.
Remote employees can better learn what’s expected of them by engaging with managers who carry out their successful behaviors even when they’re not standing in the same room. By striving to emulate company leadership, employees can use the organization’s core values to guide their performance and interactions with other remote team members. Displaying your company’s core values through its leadership’s actions enables employees to recognize and embrace them. Core values expressed through managers’ observable actions build positive team habits by example.
Create Awareness
Employees perform better when they remain confident that their workplace culture furthers an organizational mission and success. Leaders can raise awareness of the behaviors that help employees achieve success by communicating them often.
Remaining receptive to the pros and cons of a remote work environment provides insight and should include open discussions of setbacks or missteps. Temporary setbacks can serve as a teaching tool to help employees learn from their mistakes.
Managers can raise a team’s awareness of how working within a company’s cultural norms can bring rewards. Implementing a system for recognizing employees demonstrates that adhering to their company’s core values brings benefits. Instead of asking, “What is company culture all about here?” employees could recognize by leadership’s example how the organization’s core values can lead them to success.
Managers can reference the company’s cultural values in their digital communications as reminders of what employees should strive to achieve. The company’s website and promotional materials can also outline its core values to illustrate how they apply internally and externally within its customer base.
Allow for Feedback
Annual performance reviews typically provide employees with feedback regarding their work achievements. Employees may also receive annual salary increases based on their yearly reviews. However, remote workers should not wait until their annual reviews to learn how they’re doing. Timely and more immediate feedback will better serve their needs. A solid and effective remote management team should give its members feedback as often as possible.
Because feedback works as a two-way communication mode, it can be helpful to implement a peer-to-peer rating system that allows team members to show each other how to correct performance errors without shaming anyone. By offering employees a chance to improve their performance through immediate feedback, they could learn from a mistake before it can reoccur.
The peer feedback and the ability to voice complaints or concerns can help build a stronger remote team. Discussing potential issues as a team within a virtual group meeting can help everyone learn from mistakes and prevent problems from escalating. A company’s leadership’s role in maintaining a constructive environment during virtual team meetings can have much to do with the outcomes.
Continue to Build Culture
Addressing problems before they escalate helps foster a sustainable remote company culture that can weather the storm when disagreements arise. The leadership team managing a remote workgroup can promote organizational core values by example and provide clear guidelines for applying them. Referencing company “mantras” and slogans within digital communications can help serve as reminders of workplace culture norms; consider including them in the backdrops that frame your team’s virtual meetings.