How Connected Is Your Culture?
A move to greater flexibility around where people work is a positive action that many organisations have taken as a result of the pandemic. As I’ve written about before, this is long overdue and has been consistently held back by managers who don’t trust their employees or who just aren’t very good at setting expectations around work and then holding people to it.
However, key to the success of a ‘work from anywhere’ approach is having a culture that staff feel connected to regardless of where people are distributed. One where they understand and practice the values that the organisation has. Where they proactively demonstrate the behaviours expected of them in the work they’re doing. And where they embrace different ways of collaboration and communication.
Where this connection doesn’t exist it’s very easy for employees, who aren’t in the same space as each other, to feel removed from the organisation or the team and, as a result, productivity suffers. Additionally, it can give rise to a sense of loneliness, anxiety or frustration when people and the activities that bind people together aren’t as visible as they were before.
The recent Prudential/Morning Consult ‘Living the Future of Work’ survey bore this out with 55% of the people surveyed saying they feel less connected to their organisation as a result of working remotely.
On the face of it this may not seem like much of an issue. ‘Of course they don’t feel connected, they’re not in the office’ you may think. But this is to make culture all about location, when it is much more than this. Culture should be prevalent whether a person is at home, in the office, in the field, on a plane or at an event.
This is something that Wade Foster, co-founder of technology company Zapier, is always at pains to emphasise when he talks about the fact that Zapier has a 100% remote workforce. In a blog about how they go about establishing and maintaining their culture Foster talks about trust and transparency and the things that underpin both when working remotely:
“Being public and transparent about your company’s values and culture goes a long way towards establishing trust in a distributed team.”
When your people are based in different places it’s harder to maintain a cultural status quo, unless you’re deliberate about its definition in the first place. Foster again: “With co-located teams, it’s easy to ignore culture building with the expectation that it will naturally happen. In 99% of situations (made up number), this is simply not true, but by the time a co-located team realises it, it might be too late to repair their culture.”
I’ve had three approaches in this last week about teams that have recognised this. They have the tools, they have the skills, the intent is there, but there is no cultural glue to bind them all together. There’s nothing that they collectively believe in, nothing to create a sense of belonging. Nothing that they can hold themselves accountable to, take pride in and celebrate when things go well. And nothing to learn from and evolve such that the organisation and its people can grow together.
Providing employees with the opportunity to work from anywhere is a recipe for success, but only if the culture keeps them connected to each other and the goals the organisation is trying to achieve.
Do you feel connected to your culture? If not, what steps can you take to change that?
