During this extraordinary time, many teams have been forced to adapt to running a remote workforce for the first time, writes Peter Forbes, founder, HROnboard.
Simply allowing your team to work from their home or backyard is not enough – you can’t just give your existing employees or newbies a laptop and say, cya on Zoom! You still need to build purpose and delight into the everyday. The micro-moments that create a community in the office – the lunchtime hangout, coffee breaks and so on are all possible to be rethought in a virtual way.
As the founder of HROnboard, I wanted to find ways we could keep our culture alive despite isolation. Our team of 35 now take part each day in our 3.30pm remote working dance offs (for the brave) and get together on video and enjoy coffee. It’s fun, it’s engaging and for those of us who love to dance it keeps us active and having a laugh together.
To help foster a feeling of connectivity – we’ve also created slack channels for wfh-hacks & healthzone to share ideas and inspiration, plus prompts to get up and stretch.
During challenging times, the continued positive engagement of both existing staff and new hires can be a make or break on team productivity and culture; and ultimately the ability for businesses to ride out the economic impacts of Covid-19.
As a performance-based business, we already have workplace flexibility built into our DNA. Our team from sales to developers were already set up with hardware and software to work remotely. We’ve maintained our team rituals including quarterly kick-offs and OKR posters – albeit remotely. Having shared performance goals is essential for remote teams to remain engaged and have clear purpose to their daily tasks.
Here are our top hacks to maintain team culture and positive vibes with 100% of our team now working from home:
- Pot plant delight – we surprised and delighted our employees by delivering a pot plant and Q4 OKR poster to their door.
- Team leader one on ones are now weekly not fortnightly to make up the for the missed informal catchups.
- 3.30pm daily video dance-offs.
- Lunch and coffee virtual hangouts.
- Friday arvo virtual drinks.
- Wfh-hacks & healthzone slack channels to share ideas and inspiration plus prompts to get up and stretch.
Maintaining culture is so important as we all need to be more resilient to the rapid change sweeping our society. It’s essential for our employees personal and professional success. Our role at HROnboard right now is to support our HR community through their journeys – from rapid and remote onboarding to redeployment of staff. To do that we must start with taking care of our own people.
Focusing on fostering a resilient culture and team will benefit us in the months to come when the community rebounds. Most HR teams are still grappling with how to support remote working or ways to stay in touch with stood down employees. We can’t shy away from that – our team is working with some HR leaders whose businesses have been devastated by Covid-19.
We are now starting to see some organisations shift focus beyond just remote onboarding or redeployment of staff to getting the tools and business processes in place that they will need to rebound quickly when this health and economic crisis is over.
Time will tell the impact of remote working on performance, culture and team morale. Supporting our team to be resilient is imperative. We’re going through this extraordinary time alongside our partners and customers. We’re having to adapt to remotely onboard and provision new hires in a world where even sourcing hardware is challenging. We’re not perfect. However, ensuring our employees have the tools to be resilient and adapt to the constant changing way of life we are living right now is our focus.
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