A positive corporate culture is essential to helping your business succeed. Creating a supportive workplace culture can help you boost employee engagement and job satisfaction and even improve your company’s bottom-line performance.
Culture is also a significant factor in attracting and retaining talent—a big deal when you consider a new survey that found that 52% of U.S. workers are considering a job change this year. As many as 44% have actual plans in place to make a move. (Source: Harris Poll for Fast Company)
But making culture happen in today’s remote and hybrid work environments can be difficult. Simform’s 2021 Remote Work Survey found that 82% of surveyed companies plan to allow their employees to work from home indefinitely, and 77% want to make remote work a permanent solution. Still, other companies like Ernst & Young and Amazon expect workers back in the office stat.
How do you create a solid corporate culture for your IRL, hybrid, and remote workers? Here are three simple ideas.
Share your vision.
Especially during times of change, employees look to corporate leadership for direction. Now is the time to articulate your mission—your why. Then reinforce that by sharing examples of how your team is delivering on that brand promise. This builds team camaraderie and reminds people of the importance of what they’re accomplishing together.
At Shamrock, our Culture Club manages a “40 Ways to Create Awesomeness” program that recognizes and celebrates how our employees create value (or awesomeness) for our clients. Consider that good culture has its marketing advantages, too. Creating an engaging corporate culture can help you make more meaningful connections with prospects and customers.
Stay connected.
Since face-to-face meetings are vital to building strong relationships, use the next-best thing, video. You probably already use videoconferencing for team meetings and social events. Try adding live-stream events to share new product news or launches.
Instead of scheduling another Zoom call or sending an email, use a short-form video to make a more engaging and personal connection with your team.
Be intentional.
In offices, culture can evolve organically through collaborative projects, team activities, and other shared experiences. That emerging culture can then be further shaped and refined through intentional efforts.
Trending right now are Culture Kits—custom-branded packages that you can use to unite, incent, and engage your team, whether they’re in the office, working from home, or spread out in satellite locations around the world. We sent WFH kits to our team during the pandemic to let them know how much we appreciate them.
Think about building a culture kit themed for summer—road trips, camping, beach, family night, etc. Or get creative with making a kit focused on a new product line, a new office location, or even a welcome-back-to-the-office theme.
With a modern workforce regrouping and re-organizing, establishing and nurturing a solid corporate culture is essential now more than ever. If you’d like some ideas about how to build a culture club as we have at Shamrock. Or, if you’d like to learn more about culture kits for your team, connect with us. We’re here to help!
