Importance Of Positive Work Culture In Remote Virtual Working
Workplace culture is the set of behaviors, attitudes, rules and norms of working within teams or groups. It also involves all of the personal experiences of each employee that joins the organization. This behavior is heavily influenced by founders, managing directors, and other leaders because of decision making and strategic direction. However, each employee has his own influence on the workplace culture. In other words, a company’s culture is the combination individual cultures of the employees. As virtual offices are becoming popular, organizations and companies are hiring skillful and professional virtual workers regardless of their geographic location. However, the physical presence also has its own drawbacks. Nowadays a lot of people are working virtually or remotely. Hence, corporations need to maintain and promote a healthy and positive workplace culture for business development. Positive work culture can be helpful in many ways.
What is needed to maintain positive workplace culture?
Daily communication with your virtual working team is necessary to ensure that your team is committed to a specific goal. Communication with employees increases collaboration, productivity and strengthens company culture. It will also help to clean up clutter and avoid unnecessary worries. Effective communication with your virtual team needs better technological tools. Organizations that cannot provide adequate resources tend to ignore their employees and make them feel unnecessary. This is a surefire way to lose employees and destroy culture. You have to manage video and voice calls regularly in order to monitor and control your work. Hence, virtual teams cannot succeed without the right tools for communication and collaboration. The emergence of collaboration technologies such as chat, video, and virtual desktop applications are making it easier for virtual teams to work together and foster a healthy work culture. If you provide your employees the necessary tools they will be thankful to you. Large organizations and international companies have expanded their business through investment in conferencing tools or project management software.
How Can Positive Culture Create A Productive Work Environment?
Research on organizational psychology has shown that a strict working environment harms productivity by pushing pressure on the employees and stressing them out. It can cause temporary interactions but unavoidable stress tends to a breakup in the long term. If employees feel worthy, protected, supported and respected they will be committed to their work without feeling stressed and broken. Virtual team members usually come from different places and backgrounds having different cultures and values. Hence each employee needs time to accommodate cultural differences. The virtual team itself is flexible. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the schedule. If you let the virtual team to decide the work plan, it will prove beneficial to you in many ways. However, it is very important to determine the schedule for your virtual team and how you will contribute to the service.
Virtual Gatherings: A Way To Enhance Positive culture and Plan Strategic Business Goals
For virtual teams spanned across multiple locations it is especially important to bring the entire company together at least once a month for briefing new tasks. This requires a room with videoconferencing software at each office location where all employees can gather for this meeting comfortably. In the meeting you can discuss new business strategies, goals, tasks and new market trends. Physical and mental exercises can relieve stress and build a team. You can make this meeting playful through games and rewards. This will not only prove beneficial for running business effectively but will help in communicating with your employees and will promote culture.
Positive Culture Helps In Making Virtual Teams Trustworthy
Trust is very difficult to create but it is easy to lose. If it present in a team, it is excellent but it’s absence makes things difficult and inefficient. To build trust on your virtual teams needs consistent communication and good listening skills. This needs an attitude of understanding their limits and fears. An excellent way of encouraging virtual workers to work at their potential, is to realize that each of them is different. There is no simple formula to teach and motivate them to receive a positive feedback. Therefore it is very important for business managers to be aware of this fact and encourage their employees to make best out of each of them in a highly customized way. All of this is possible through a successful and healthy workplace culture.
The Bottom Line
As technology and globalization are continuously dominating, business leaders need a change in their way doing business. New business models and a changing economic environment are forever changing the way we run our companies. As technology continues to advance and boundaries remain meaningless, it is critical for business leaders to realize that existing management practices may no longer work. Organizations that have expanded their businesses and set up new teams need better technology tools and techniques to develop a sense of belonging, being valued, and at home for their virtual teams. Hence, corporate culture remains a business priority regardless of border, region or distance.
