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How do you cultivate great company culture in a hybrid workplace?
A lot of companies are willingly or unwillingly adopting a hybrid work approach. Regardless of their reason, most leaders have one common hesitation about moving to hybrid…
The culture.
If you are coming from a tight and enthusiastic office culture, you’ve got a lot to lose. You know how to read each other’s social cues, you flow well in meetings. How do you transfer and maintain that in a hybrid work culture?
Creating a great hybrid work culture is not easy, but it’s essential if you are going to continue to offer flexibility to team members.
The importance of hybrid work culture
A hybrid work culture is important for the same reason any work culture is important — culture is the foundation of an organization. A good company culture is one that leaves employees feeling seen, heard, and appreciated. As a result, morale remains high, productivity increases and the company enjoys continual growth.
Failing to establish good company culture leads to employees feeling disconnected, retention issues, decreased morale, and the low likelihood of reaching your goals.
Why hybrid culture is harder
If you’re building culture in a hybrid workplace, you’re essentially doing three tasks at once — maintaining your in-office culture, cultivating a great distributed culture, and merging the two together equitably. That’s why it’s so hard to pull off.
Top ways to build effective work culture in a hybrid workplace
One of the reasons leaders find it hard to cultivate culture is because they can’t properly define it.
Definitions of culture are many, but here are some of the components of culture:
- Culture is reflected in the team’s mood – a deflated team likely reflects disinterest from management, and a highly efficient and innovative team shows that management takes care of their people
- Culture is the collection of spoken and unspoken rules, policies, and social cues
- Culture is the feeling of doing fun things together
So, how can you start creating a strong hybrid work culture and close the gap between what your culture is on paper and what it is in actuality?
Foster transparency and accountability
Like in an in-person working place, a good culture constitutes transparency, honesty, and accountability. When you cultivate a culture of transparency and accountability, each team member knows what their responsibilities are and know what to expect from their colleagues.
Giving your employees ownership over tasks also shows them that you trust them and allows them to get creative and innovative with their solutions.
Transparency, on the other hand, allows employees to give honest feedback and address problems — which will bring you closer to your stated values and culture.
Be intentional about times to connect
Every team needs time not just to do work, but to connect on a human level to build team chemistry.
We refer to this as the Unwork mode of work. These are opportunities for the team to get together and create connections through fun and engaging activities that don’t revolve around work.
This often happens without anyone forcing it in a typical office setup. But in a distributed team, you have to be intentional about creating the conditions for connection. You could try:
- Having employees setup virtual coffee through apps like Donut for Slack
- Find fun games to play online with coworkers
- Sending employees off into breaking rooms for a few minutes to catch up after a meeting
- Prioritize relationship building during any in-person time you have
Setup virtual alternatives to offsites
The hybrid work model provides a lot of flexibility for employees, and you’ll find that some of them still enjoy coming into the office, whether it’s one, three, or five days a week.
To create a hybrid team with a great culture, you’ll need to set up team days when the entire team can work together, both onsite and offsite. To do that, you can get the office space ready and invite team members to come in once a month.
Establish a hybrid communication plan
A good company culture leaves all employees feeling seen and appreciated. So it’s important that all employees are up to date with the latest announcements and communications in general.
A solid hybrid communication plan stipulating that all communication needs to take place digitally ensures that everyone in the team is up to speed. The occasional phone call is fine, but make sure the important stuff is visible for everyone – remember – good culture embraces equity!
Also think about your approach to hybrid meetings.
Provide equal opportunities to in-office and remote employees
Speaking of equity and inclusion – an employee’s mode of work should never factor into whether you delegate tasks to them, award them bonuses or give them that promotion.
Progressive leaders are working hard to weed out the already existing biases within work cultures, and with this new model, more biases are bound to creep in, so we need to stay aware and not let outdated notions of productivity (like presenteeism) dictate decisions.
Balance the extra benefits
As leaders rethink hybrid workplaces, they’ll make lots of modifications for their distributed team. But, you have accommodations for in-person staff too. An example would be to give in-office employees a transportation allowance just as their digital counterparts will get a WFH stipend.
Create a robust hybrid onboarding process
Building a great hybrid work culture will make intuitive leaders push the envelope or even rethink culture, processes and systems all together.
Create an onboarding process for new talent that accurately reflects the hybrid culture you want to create. Highlight that they can choose their work mode and that output expectations and KPIs are updated accordingly to align.
The hybrid onboarding process should highlight the best of both worlds — distributed and in-office. If you invite people to come to the office, but it’s a ghost town during onboarding, you haven’t made the best use of it.
Creating a good hybrid work culture will have a lot of trial and error, so stay agile, create a safe space to air concerns, be ready to receive honest feedback and constantly evolve.
Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels
How do you cultivate great company culture in a hybrid workplace?
A lot of companies are willingly or unwillingly adopting a hybrid work approach. Regardless of their reason, most leaders have one common hesitation about moving to hybrid…
The culture.
If you are coming from a tight and enthusiastic office culture, you’ve got a lot to lose. You know how to read each other’s social cues, you flow well in meetings. How do you transfer and maintain that in a hybrid work culture?
Creating a great hybrid work culture is not easy, but it’s essential if you are going to continue to offer flexibility to team members.
The importance of hybrid work culture
A hybrid work culture is important for the same reason any work culture is important — culture is the foundation of an organization. A good company culture is one that leaves employees feeling seen, heard, and appreciated. As a result, morale remains high, productivity increases and the company enjoys continual growth.
Failing to establish good company culture leads to employees feeling disconnected, retention issues, decreased morale, and the low likelihood of reaching your goals.
Why hybrid culture is harder
If you’re building culture in a hybrid workplace, you’re essentially doing three tasks at once — maintaining your in-office culture, cultivating a great distributed culture, and merging the two together equitably. That’s why it’s so hard to pull off.
Top ways to build effective work culture in a hybrid workplace
One of the reasons leaders find it hard to cultivate culture is because they can’t properly define it.
Definitions of culture are many, but here are some of the components of culture:
- Culture is reflected in the team’s mood – a deflated team likely reflects disinterest from management, and a highly efficient and innovative team shows that management takes care of their people
- Culture is the collection of spoken and unspoken rules, policies, and social cues
- Culture is the feeling of doing fun things together
So, how can you start creating a strong hybrid work culture and close the gap between what your culture is on paper and what it is in actuality?
Foster transparency and accountability
Like in an in-person working place, a good culture constitutes transparency, honesty, and accountability. When you cultivate a culture of transparency and accountability, each team member knows what their responsibilities are and know what to expect from their colleagues.
Giving your employees ownership over tasks also shows them that you trust them and allows them to get creative and innovative with their solutions.
Transparency, on the other hand, allows employees to give honest feedback and address problems — which will bring you closer to your stated values and culture.
Be intentional about times to connect
Every team needs time not just to do work, but to connect on a human level to build team chemistry.
We refer to this as the Unwork mode of work. These are opportunities for the team to get together and create connections through fun and engaging activities that don’t revolve around work.
This often happens without anyone forcing it in a typical office setup. But in a distributed team, you have to be intentional about creating the conditions for connection. You could try:
- Having employees setup virtual coffee through apps like Donut for Slack
- Find fun games to play online with coworkers
- Sending employees off into breaking rooms for a few minutes to catch up after a meeting
- Prioritize relationship building during any in-person time you have
Setup virtual alternatives to offsites
The hybrid work model provides a lot of flexibility for employees, and you’ll find that some of them still enjoy coming into the office, whether it’s one, three, or five days a week.
To create a hybrid team with a great culture, you’ll need to set up team days when the entire team can work together, both onsite and offsite. To do that, you can get the office space ready and invite team members to come in once a month.
Establish a hybrid communication plan
A good company culture leaves all employees feeling seen and appreciated. So it’s important that all employees are up to date with the latest announcements and communications in general.
A solid hybrid communication plan stipulating that all communication needs to take place digitally ensures that everyone in the team is up to speed. The occasional phone call is fine, but make sure the important stuff is visible for everyone – remember – good culture embraces equity!
Also think about your approach to hybrid meetings.
Provide equal opportunities to in-office and remote employees
Speaking of equity and inclusion – an employee’s mode of work should never factor into whether you delegate tasks to them, award them bonuses or give them that promotion.
Progressive leaders are working hard to weed out the already existing biases within work cultures, and with this new model, more biases are bound to creep in, so we need to stay aware and not let outdated notions of productivity (like presenteeism) dictate decisions.
Balance the extra benefits
As leaders rethink hybrid workplaces, they’ll make lots of modifications for their distributed team. But, you have accommodations for in-person staff too. An example would be to give in-office employees a transportation allowance just as their digital counterparts will get a WFH stipend.
Create a robust hybrid onboarding process
Building a great hybrid work culture will make intuitive leaders push the envelope or even rethink culture, processes and systems all together.
Create an onboarding process for new talent that accurately reflects the hybrid culture you want to create. Highlight that they can choose their work mode and that output expectations and KPIs are updated accordingly to align.
The hybrid onboarding process should highlight the best of both worlds — distributed and in-office. If you invite people to come to the office, but it’s a ghost town during onboarding, you haven’t made the best use of it.
Creating a good hybrid work culture will have a lot of trial and error, so stay agile, create a safe space to air concerns, be ready to receive honest feedback and constantly evolve.
Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels
