Yet, people seek out and thrive in positive work cultures. It’s in your team’s best interest to build and maintain a good remote work culture, especially if your team is working from home for an extended period.

Signs that your company culture is beginning to degrade

A strong “Values Code” is an organisation’s North Star. If you have a good understanding of your core values, it becomes easier and quicker to spot the warning signs of employee disengagement or weakening company culture.

Here are a couple of indicators to look out for:

• Start with yourself - how are you feeling? Are you working longer hours than you did in the office? Interacting less frequently with your team? Leading by example becomes even more important when your team is working remotely, especially if this is a new normal for your team. If you notice your behaviour has changed, for the worse, it’s likely your team might be falling into similar bad habits.
• Quiet team channels - was your office a hive of activity but your (new) online team communication channels feels quiet? Are team members not as virtual team meetings as they were with in-person meetings?
• Is everyone “always on”? - have you noticed you’re getting emails and messages well after your office hours or even on the weekend? Do people seem to be working through their lunch breaks? There’s a fine line between respecting the hours people choose to work and calling out when people are overworking themselves. The life-work balance can get blurry when we’re all working from home.
• High turnover - if turnover starts creeping up, this is a big red flag that there may be underlying issues with your company culture.

How to actively gauge company culture?

Apart from watching out for those indicators, which are often lagging, you can also proactively keep tabs on how people are feeling.

More frequent but shorter check-ins can help your team feel heard and get more comfortable communicating digitally. They can also serve as “pulse checks” and give you earlier indications of declining company culture.

This can also be done more formally through regular (short) surveys or giving people the chance to give feedback anonymously, and actively encouraging the practice.

How to encourage feedback?

Utilise your organisation’s communication tools to show your team the different ways they can remain connected, and most importantly, how communication channels with you remain open.

When talking to your team one on one, directly ask for their feedback, ensure you’re actively listening, and follow up on issues they may raise. If employees see that action results from their feedback, they are likely to be more encouraged to speak up again in future.

Setting aside time specifically for people to give feedback, for example, 10 minutes at the end of meetings can also help start building the habit of giving and receiving feedback.

Importantly, don’t forget to share positive feedback! Celebrating wins and sharing knowledge across your team goes a long way to helping people feel engaged and recognised.

Finally, if you do find that your team is struggling to adapt to remote work, it may not be amiss to ask for help from your human resources team or an external consultant to run a training session on communication, giving feedback or even work-from-home best practices.

At Lucida, we believe in hiring with empathy. Strong interpersonal relationships go a long way towards building successful teams and businesses. Want to discuss your remote work hiring strategy? Drop us a line at hello@lucida.io.