Tough Times Call for Strong Work Culture
Is your team showing signs of work-from-home fatigue? I see this happen more and more as the pandemic wears on and we lose out on the natural conversations that pop up in hallways and break rooms when we’re physically together. The result? It takes extra effort to keep everyone in the loop about important topics.
Speaking of extra effort: you thought there were a lot of emails flying around before? Now your people are bombarded by communication all the time. This inundation means that they might let a few of those emails slide or screen a phone call or two.
And what about that meeting half your team missed because someone left them off the invite? As if Covid hasn’t made everyone feel anxious or uncertain enough, now your best people are wondering why you thought it was OK to make a critical decision without them. Don’t you trust them? Are they failing? When is this going to end?
Creating A Thriving Team Culture is a Challenge Worth Accepting
Covid or not, creating a culture where all employees feel engaged with the “why” of their jobs is hard. People lose their sense of teamwork for all sorts of reasons. We get mired in the day-to-day and forget about the values we agreed to when we first joined the company.
Helping your team reconnect to their sense of purpose can be incredibly challenging when working remotely, but it is not impossible. Do the work now to ensure that all of your people feel valued, seen, and inspired and that effort will pay dividends down the road.
Case Study: The Little Tech Company That Could
A few months back, a relatively young tech company engaged me to give a workshop on best practices for communication and reporting. They encountered some issues while making the switch from onsite to remote and brought me in to help ease the transition. As soon as I met with the owners and got the full story, I realized they needed much more than a one-day workshop.
Some necessary context: This company started strong right out of the gate. They won tons of work early on and expanded quickly. To manage increased workload, they hired a bunch of people and failed to clearly define their roles or onboard them properly.
Then Covid hit, which didn’t help. However, their problems were foundational. This well-intentioned but struggling company had a distrustful work culture. They hadn’t defined their values or created a mission and vision statement. There was no psychological safety, no trust, and as a result, employee attrition was skyrocketing.
To Build a Thriving Culture, Go Back to Basics
Once I’d completed my assessment phase, it was clear that this business needed to not only address the fatigue, but organizational and structural changes, if they wanted to survive.
If any of this is familiar to you, know that you’re not alone. There are so many companies contending with the same issues right now. Here are some basic practices that you can implement to get your team rowing in the same direction, whether they’re onsite or working from home.
Create Safe Spaces: Create psychological safety by developing guiding principles for how you want to communicate, operate and handle tough topics as they arise. This will make it easier for people to enter into challenging conversations without fear of repercussions or retaliation.
Talk Straight: Delivering feedback or confronting a problem doesn’t have to lead to significant conflict. Once you’ve created a container for honesty and safety, have the difficult conversations. When you ignore problems, you lay the foundation for chaos down the road.
Eliminate Gossip: Gossip can kill a work culture. Only discuss a problem with someone who can do something about it. If there are conflicts or tensions, address them directly through the appropriate communication channels.
Become a Great Listener: Watch the little voice in your head that provides constant commentary during a hard conversation and separate yourself from that voice. Listen to connect, rather than react. When you do this, you activate the part of your brain that allows for creative thought and a growth mindset.
Clarify Values: It’s not enough to say you value honesty. Ask your team to be specific about how that looks. Make decisions together about how you want to operate and take action to get your shared values “on the court.”
Be Kind: At the very least, create a culture that rewards people for being kind and courteous to each other. It’s time to bring humanity back into business.
Set Yourself Up for Employee Engagement Success
Yes, Covid has affected the way we work and collaborate. If you find yourself wondering how to foster a sense of teamwork when your people aren’t physically together, the answer has everything to do with your existing work culture. Once you create a workplace built on psychological safety, trust, and teamwork, you’ll be able to pull together no matter what seismic shifts the universe sends your way.
If you know your work culture could use some fine-tuning (or a total reboot), let’s talk.
