Every business has its own unique culture. Whether it has been carefully created or naturally been adopted over time, company culture is vital. With an increasing number of employees working remotely, a business’ culture is more important than ever.
Company culture is all about how a team works together cohesively, as opposed to an individual’s performance, attitude or personality. When working from home, it can be easy for this company culture to become lost. Without the day to day interactions and face to face meetings, company culture will inevitably change slightly, but it must remain for remote teams.
Why Is Company Culture Important For Remote Working?
A lot of teams don’t understand the value of company culture, but it can help to boost productivity, employee satisfaction and revenue. It is a common misconception that company culture only matters when everyone is sharing the same office, but a remote company culture is often even more critical.
An influential culture isn’t just created by everyone being together, but instead, it is constructed from employees’ actions. It underpins everything a team does, including how they communicate and the decisions they make.
Remote working can leave team members feeling disconnected, primarily when they are used to being in the office every day. It is more important than ever that each team member understands exactly how their role and their input fits in with the rest of the team and the business’s strategic plans.
When working remotely, open communication is vital, and each employee should be willing to discuss their work behaviour openly and honestly. This can help teams to work remotely while feeling confident and comfortable working towards the same goal.
How To Build A Strong Company Culture With A Remote Team?
Team culture can’t just be created and enforced by one person; it takes everyone working together to develop a culture that works. For most companies, the culture changes slightly every time a new member joins the team, and they bring their own unique edge.
There are a few ways you can help to encourage a strong company culture when your employees are working remotely;
Create Traditions And Habits
Every group of people, whether that is families or close friends, have specific activities or traditions that they do. This might be weekly drinks, a monthly day out or just a regular catch up call. Whatever the activity is, having these traditions keeps everyone cohesive, and it encourages open communication.
Try to create some traditions among your remote working team. It doesn’t need to be anything significant, but just a weekly video coffee morning, or a virtual games night, can help build a strong culture in the team.
A Sense Of Accountability
One of the critical aspects of any company culture is that employees know exactly how their role fits into the organisation’s overall plans. It is vital that you highlight the dependencies and connections between each team members work. This will help to create a sense of accountability for everything they do and improve the all-round team culture.
Ensure Plenty Of Face Time
Remote working brings many challenges, but one of the biggest to company culture is a lack to face to face interaction. For teams to communicate effectively, some amount of face time with each other is vital. Groups will never be able to communicate openly and honestly if they only ever talk via email, so create opportunities for more meaningful interactions.
Schedule some live working sessions, where the entire team can work on their projects together. By using video conferencing tools, you can mimic a typical office workspace where all team members would be working together in the same room.
Another option is to schedule weekly check-in calls where the whole team can get together and discuss their developments throughout the week. Encourage honest and open feedback and questions during these communications.
Reward And Recognise
When teams work from home, it can be easy for individuals to begin to feel unmotivated and unappreciated. Promote a strong company culture by making sure remote employees are recognised and rewarded for their hard work.
Set up a process so that team members can highlight others that they can see are doing a great job and find a way to reward hard work. By creating a reward process within your company culture, employees will feel valued and important, even when working remotely.
Prioritise Upskilling
Some of the best company cultures around have a strong focus on upskilling and ongoing learning. Investing and prioritising your employee’s progression and education is an effective way to create a strong culture and also boost employee morale.
Team members will not only enhance their skills and bring new knowledge to the business, but they will feel more valued in their roles. Whatever industry your company operates within, there are always options for further training, and often online training can run alongside working remotely.
Here at TSG Training, we offer a vast range of online and virtual training courses that can help promote company culture and enhance your team’s skillset. Whether at foundation or advanced levels, we have courses available for a wide range of subjects and abilities.
Our
ISTQB Advanced Test Manager course is perfect for test professionals that already have several years’ experience and want to enhance their skills further. This course is also great for those who want a deeper understanding of how software testing works.
For employees who could benefit from improving their knowledge and understanding of finance, our
APMG International Finance For Non-Financial Managers E-Learning course is ideal. Trainees will learn all about how business decisions impact the financial health of an organisation.
Not only do we offer various training courses for improving company culture, but we also have a range of free online webinars. These webinars can give you insight into specific subjects and can help you and your employees decide if a training course is the right option. Our
ISTQB Certified Mobile App Test Webinar, for example, covers information on the methods, techniques and tools for testing mobile applications.
