REBOOTING CORPORATE CULTURE FOR THE HYBRID WORKFORCE OF THE FUTURE
The hybrid work model is here to stay, but is your corporate culture equipped for the new challenges it presents? There is no escaping that remote work has transformed from a rushed contingency plan into a cornerstone of current and future business models, but there is a significant disconnect between leadership and employees. Leaders tend to see remote work as a necessary evil and are three times more likely than their employees to prefer a full return to the office. Additionally, 76 percent of employees do not want to go back to the office full-time. Ever. In the middle of ‘the Great Resignation’, this means leaders that want to capture and retain talent need to evolve company culture to embrace a distributed workforce rather than merely tolerating it.
Challenges in defining and upholding culture
Rebooting corporate culture comes with a host of challenges, including defining what that culture is. With a distributed workforce, the typical image of culture as what goes on within the office during working hours is no longer valid. While free snacks and a game room may have been key to company culture in the past, we must broaden definitions to account for the lack of daily in-person interaction and focus more on how the organisation fulfils its goals and supports employees as they work toward those goals.
Codes of conduct are core elements of any corporate culture, but more leaders are finding out that remote work has driven a need for more explicit rules that address distributed teams. You would never expect an employee to turn up at the office in pyjamas, yet many people appear comfortable attending online meetings looking like they have just rolled out of bed. In more disturbing developments, one in four employees has experienced sexual harassment during remote work. Shoring up the code of conduct to cover both in-person and remote or hybrid workers fairly is key to building a strong culture.
Jan-Mar 2022 Issue
SAI360