Top 5 Steps to Adapt Company Culture for Remote Work

Adapting your company culture to support remote work is one of the most important things you can do to set your company up for work-from-home success. Hear from companies like Zoom, Help Scout, Mural, and Buffer on how they are adapting company culture for remote work, and get a 5 Step Plan to kick off conversations with your employees and leadership.

1.Define Your Culture

The first step to building a strong culture is aligning vision, mission, and core values. This is true for all companies, regardless of where you choose to be located, so it’s likely that you already have these defined. If that’s the case, use this as an opportunity to revisit them and ensure they can continue to serve your brand and workforce well in the “new normal.” In fact, we recommend collaboratively revisiting these three aspects of culture with your leadership teams each year to ensure they still apply to your evolving business strategy.

2.Watch Your Culture in Action

Too often, company culture goals get trapped on a motivational poster, but are rarely witnessed in daily work life. To activate your culture, don’t just expect employees to miraculously sense your values when they join the team—integrate them into conversations and processes. Don’t educate your team on what the values should be, allow them to experience them firsthand in the way you formulate objectives and goals, collaboratively develop ideas, and in the way you decide who to work with.

3.Update Leadership Mindset

In a virtual environment, leadership takes a new form. Instead of supervising only productivity, managers need to focus on results, while supporting productivity with trust, communication, and clear expectations. In the ideal case, managers empower and hold individuals accountable to doing their best work with fewer distractions, while focusing on department success and development. Doing so empowers the workers to self-manage their daily tasks, which promotes intrinsic motivation and less reactivity.

4.Design Your New Workplace

Just because employees may not be coming into the office doesn’t mean they don’t need a “place” to gather and interact. If anything, that location and engagement is more important than ever to prevent remote worker isolation. But who said that place has to be physical? Virtual workplaces can be just as dynamic, insightful, and productive as collocated offices, giving team members that same “vibe” of our company culture when they are present. Designing a virtual workplace strategy consists of creating neutral, digital locations with software and processes that are equally accessible from the office as they are from a home or mobile office. How you choose to design your virtual workplace will play a big role in how connected and dedicated employees feel to the team and organizational success.

5.Set Expectations

Now that you’ve put in the hard work of defining your culture, watching it in action, updating your leadership mindset, and designing your workplace, it’s time to make it sustainable by setting expectations with the team for how culture will be upheld and how they can maintain and elevate connectedness.

Inspired by: Connect Culture from Your Home Office – Zoom Event.