The new culture wars: 3 ways to preserve company culture in a remote world
Organizations need to be intentional about how they build, implement and sustain culture across the employee experience.
Remote work has been tough on high culture organizations. By high culture, I mean those organizations with distinctive cultures that are part of the reason why people chose to join and stay in an organization. In HR speak – where the culture is a key part of the employee value proposition, alongside engaging work and good compensation and benefits.
In the creative field, culture is not just a nice-to-have for employee experience – it’s core to many companies’ business models. Many creative people, including designers, strategists, data scientists, technologists, product managers, program would die a spiritual death in much of corporate America. Yet corporate America needs creativity more than ever to reinvent their businesses in light of changing market, technology and regulatory demands, and to enhance their customer experience.
Related: EVP 101: Creating & communicating your employee value proposition
For many, it’s precisely this “corporate culture” that’s purported to kill creativity and stifle growth. For creative studios such as frog, a key part of enabling a rich and creative culture comes from the studio model. Employees mostly work in small teams of creatives, formed around a specific client engagement or project. Like most consulting firms, these teams are formed and dissolved every two to three months as individuals move from engagement to engagement.
Studios are the touchpoints by which employees can experience a firm’s creative culture. Designed to foster creativity through interaction with others, studios allow for a variety of activities, from trainings and team meetings to community-building events and programs. However, relying on a physical space to foster this cultural thread became nearly impossible at the onset of the COVID pandemic when individuals were faced with no other choice but to work from home. High culture organizations were concerned about their ability to operate, given that culture is such a key part of their operating model. Part of this concern came from the fact that managers thought innovative work required people to be “shoulder to shoulder” in the same physical space. Designers, engineers, data scientists and strategists all have different vocabularies and different ways of seeing the world. As opposed to a corporate department of marketers or finance people working together, teams don’t always share the same terminology, processes and work tools.
Despite these concerns, many creative firms were able to move to a global remote work model in March 2020 with excellent results. All businesses faced the same problems at first, like too many video calls, breakdown of work-life balance, isolation and so on, but found ways to adapt to this new working style as a culture, not just as a business.
One of the keys to success lies in understanding what actually improved with remote work, and what aspects needed more attention in order to preserve or create new rituals. For example, we found that the use of digital tools for ideation and synthesis provided a more permanent record of the team’s thinking and ideation process, in addition to being more efficient. Tools like the digital whiteboard will certainly persist, even when we return to the studio. Additionally, we found that messaging apps and platforms added to a sense of global community, expanding connections beyond the traditional studio walls.
The road ahead is still unclear. Many companies planned to return to their offices in some capacity this year, but with persisting Covid cases continuing to affect the country, these plans have been pushed to 2022, or indefinitely. With things still up in the air, it’s important for HR decision makers to continue to foster a strong culture amongst their teams no matter where they are working from. As we continue to grow in this hybrid world, firms should take into consideration a few key factors as if they want to make their culture a priority.
Be deliberate about culture
Put into place culture-building moments that highlight the success and the hard work of the organization and the people who make it what it is. For example, at Frog we have the Make Your Mark Awards, an annual awards show to recognize the best work across the firm. This high production virtual event recognized quality client work in multiple categories but also showcased frog colleagues presenting and performing in all sorts of fashions. Oddly enough, colleagues from around the world said this was a high point in terms of feeling connected to each other and the firm, even though we kicked off the Make Your Mark awards in the middle of the pandemic.
Understand employee archetypes
A young person joining a firm out of graduate school, moving to a city where we have a studio and living in shared housing has a very different set of needs to a parent of teenagers living in the suburbs. Both are attracted to the firm and want something from the culture, but a one-size-fits-all model won’t work. As firms define cultural touchpoints for hybrid work, they must consider a broader set of needs that adapts to different archetypes within the employee experience.
Do what’s best for the team
When it comes to mandates for remote, hybrid or in-person work, a one-size-fits-all mandate might not work across an entire organization either. Different teams require different things to do their best work. In some cases, being able to staff a project with people from around the globe is what’s best for a project, and other times a smaller group is needed to work person for a few days on end to really get to the bottom of a problem. But having the flexibility at both the studio and global level allows everyone to work with changing circumstances, rather than against them. Our engagement leaders and studio general managers are still navigating the boundaries of future collaboration models, but we have allowed ourselves to be open to experiment as we hone our future working models.
Almost two years into the COVID experience, it’s likely that most firms have onboarded new employees who have joined their companies remotely and have never been to a studio or office, let alone met many of their colleagues and teams in person. While rituals and actions may look or feel different than before, we are beyond a place where we can rely on relationships built pre-COVID to tide us over.
Instead, we must embrace this moment of change in order to learn from it, rather than fight it. The fact is that culture remains a key factor to any organization’s success. But culture is not just the “perks” like snacks in the office or happy hours once a week, it’s the way we build relationships, share knowledge and support each other that truly makes a difference.
Timothy Morey serves as the vice president of strategy of frog, a leading global creative consultancy, part of Capgemini Invent. Partnering with passionate leaders and visionary entrepreneurs, frog applies creativity, strategy, design and data to re-invent businesses, drive growth and orchestrate customer centric transformation.
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