Knowledge workers have adapted to working away from their colleagues much faster than anyone could have imagined.
Far from productivity going down, it’s mostly stayed the same or gone up (see Management Today’s Will Hybrid Working Ever Work or our own episode WLP255).
Given the suboptimal conditions that some employees are dealing with at home, the results of the “suddenly working from home” workforce are impressive.
While most business leaders are confident that productivity won’t be affected if their employees continue to work remotely, they are concerned about employees losing their sense of belonging and feeling emotionally (as well as physically) dispersed. They are openly asking, “How do we sustain our culture, which we love, in a new remote/hybrid set up? How can we prevent our company’s culture, from turning into a culture of disengagement, silos, and disconnection?
Back to Basics
Before we come up with solutions involving watercooler channels in MSTeams, emojis and pub quizzes online (all perfectly valid practices to keep the social spirit alive), let’s recap what culture is.
As always, let’s go back to the key concepts of leadership and organisational behaviour, and then adapt them to “remote”.
Culture is built on assumptions, about ourselves and how we see the world.
Those assumptions lead to values (sometimes articulated, others not) that result in visible behaviours.
Symbols and artifacts reflect those values and sometimes enable those behaviours.
Rituals and shared experiences develop which reflect those values.
Let’s revisit Edgar Schein’s Onion: