Topic Employee Engagement
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The American workforce has been largely transformed – and one of the biggest shifts is how prevalent remote and hybrid work has become. In 2023, 12.7% of full-time employees were remote. Though many jobs returned to the office after the pandemic years, the rate of remote jobs is increasing, with 22% of the workforce expected to be remote by 2025.
Workers increasingly value flexibility and work-life balance in their work arrangements – and remote work offers that almost entirely.Whether your company wants to incorporate remote or hybrid roles to accommodate the growing shift in worker sentiment or you want to cut down on overhead costs, it’s critical to foster a company culture that’s conducive to productivity.
In this post, we will discuss some ideas for enriching your remote work culture in a way that makes your employees – and your bottom line – satisfied.
Ideas for Building Your Remote Work Culture
Growing culture among remote work teams requires different strategies and tactics than an in-person team, but it’s by no means a difficult task.
Let’s look at some ideas for how your company can build its remote work culture!
Know Where Culture Differs for Remote Teams
Because there is no physical interaction in a remote work scenario, you won't have an exact match between the culture in your office space and one that develops in a remote work environment. However, you can approximate many of the effects of physical interaction by taking advantage of the technology and tools available to your business. Keeping your staff connected and capable of speaking to each other in ways that allow work to occur helps people feel supported and engaged in their roles.
Using online chat features and scheduling company-wide video calls can help your team communicate regularly with each other.
Preserve Your Schedule
Your schedule is an integral part of your employees' interactions with one another. If you have a Monday morning meeting at 9 a.m. in the office, you should continue to hold that meeting but instead do so via video chat.
If you're used to separating into specific teams to work on projects, set up an online meeting space where those employees can connect with one another. This can help maintain the positive, collaborative culture you've always had for your team, even when you cannot meet face to face.
Since remote work allows people to achieve their work flexibly and during their peak productivity hours, establishing core hours where people need to be on-call to help others lets the team feel they can keep in contact when need be, but in a way that still allows for their autonomy.
Host Virtual (or In-Person) Events
Planning days when staff meets either in an office space or for events, like happy hours, lets you give people some face-to-face time to get to know each other. One of the biggest hurdles that remote workers face is that they can often feel disconnected from their team, and getting to know team members helps to instill a shared sense of camaraderie regardless of how near or far people are to each other.
Holding monthly or quarterly meetings where the entire company celebrates achievements or shares stories lets you instill your culture and values while letting people take time from their daily tasks. You can host virtual coffee breaks, lunches, or even happy hours to help encourage connection across the company.
Find a solution that works effectively for your business! Consider when your employees were most likely to get together and take steps to host virtual or recurring in-person events that will allow them to continue those meet-ups.
Conduct One-on-One Check-Ins
Letting your team get together to see each other and have shared moments doesn’t remove the need for individualized talks. Leaders and team members should set up standing meetings with their employees to get insight into how their work is doing or to see if they can offer help or advice to make their work smoother. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to see how your staff feels about their workload, like if they need added support, get something off their plate, or take a step back to get a different take on their work.
Prioritize Flexibility
Preserving every aspect of your company culture may take too much time, especially when your employees are still juggling their busy schedules. However, you can take many steps to help maintain your culture and keep your business operating smoothly by encouraging your staff to focus on their personal lives and be the best versions of themselves.
It's critical to let your best people be great people to those in their lives outside of work. The shift to remote work is part of a bigger movement toward a desire for having a flexible work-life balance. Even if your team isn’t fully remote and still uses a hybrid schedule, letting your highest-performing workers rearrange their schedules to accommodate their children’s camp schedules or take their parents to a doctor’s appointment gives them this freedom. They’ll feel grateful to the company for letting them do so – and will be more productive as a result.
Outsource HR for Increased Capability
Managing a remote team isn’t always as simple as hiring people anywhere. Having the online capabilities to manage teams from far away and the HR expertise to administer the different tax and other states’ regulatory requirements is difficult to achieve. But outsourcing HR helps to expand your internal HR team’s capacity – ensuring you adhere to regulations anywhere and giving your staff more time to focus on employee outreach.
A trusted HR partner like Questco can provide your company with the guidance and support it needs to grow into a thriving enterprise—no matter where its team is located.
Build a Healthy Remote Work Culture with These Ideas
Developing a thriving remote work culture has different requirements than what you’d need for an in-person team – but by no means is it more challenging to achieve. Use these ideas to help enrich your remote work culture and create a thriving team.
Contact Questco today to learn how we can help increase your remote work capabilities.
