So much of my working career has been focussed on helping employers to foster a positive workplace culture, or to improve it when metrics or investors deem it necessary. Recruitment of talent can be tricky and expensive, keeping staff motivated and engaged enough to stay for the long-term even more of a challenge.
The clients I work with have long shown commitment to improving their culture, and more-often-than-not we’ve seen the workplace environment and opportunities to be social as being key factors in improving workplace culture.
But then, Covid happened. The cool office spaces, beer o’clock on Fridays, team lunches and socials all came to a halt overnight. So what do you do when you want to maintain a great working culture, but your employees are all logging on remotely and spending time together in an office space is officially deemed “non-essential” due to the pandemic?
As the vaccine is rolled-out we begin to get a sense that, one day, we will be able to be based in offices together once-again. But from what we’ve seen from the employee engagement questionnaire responses we’ve had recently is that staff have no desire to simply return to the old way of working. The pandemic has brought about less reliance on being in an office with colleagues, an appreciation of having no commute and the ability to work around other commitments outside of the standard 9-5. So whilst we will enjoy the time we spend together and staff do miss it mid-lockdown, when we can attend offices again employers must also recognise that there is a greater appetite for “Hybrid Working” than we ever saw pre-pandemic.
How this fits into culture is tricky; and my clients have been asking how they can shape their culture remotely. My advice has been consistent across sectors and regardless of organisation sizes; culture is about how it feels to be employed by you, and the key to getting this right is understanding what makes your employees tick. Here are three ways I’ve advised my clients on how to improve their culture in the post-Covid world:
Inclusivity
How does it feel to be part of your organisation? Do your policies and procedures promote inclusivity? Most employers will say yes to this, but this is no longer enough. A policy can only do so much; having people measured on their commitment to the inclusivity agenda is what staff are now looking for because without this any policy is just words. I covered some of this in my previous blog on “Inclusivity” but the key is that employers of choice need to have methods by which inclusivity is recognised, celebrated, encouraged and welcomed. This starts with recruitment; do your practices get the best out of people? What are you doing to support everyone to feel a part of the business, what networks have you created within your business to recognise affinity groups and bring people together?
Greater Autonomy
The most engaged employers I work with are conscious that employees want to be stretched, they want a range of varied and interesting work and to feel that they have autonomy over input and solutions. The key to keeping good staff is to offer them something they can’t get elsewhere; giving them influence over their own development, quality time with their manager to discuss frustrations or aspirations, investment in training because you see they have potential, being open and honest about where they fit within the business and how they could have greater input. It’s no longer enough to just assume that staff will remain motivated because they’re receiving a good salary for the work they do. This has been a key factor in changing mindsets with some of my clients; accepting that anyone can pay an employee and match your salary offer and poach them away from your company, to keep them you’ve got to make them feel invested in for the long-term.
What is your moral stance?
With the public sector clients I work with, this is a quick-win. Working for a Council, School or Housing association provides staff with opportunity to see how their work has a positive effect on the community around them. Quite often this sense of community contribution is what attracts the talent to the roles and gives them a sense on purpose throughout their employment. But how do you do achieve this when you’re a Marketing Agency? An Architect’s practice? A Hotel? If your business is doing well financially, keeping your eye on the social conscience of your company and shouting about what you believe and what you do is a major factor in attracting talent and appealing again to that question “how does it feel to work for you?” Employees are now invested in how working for your business has an impact on the world around them, and by how their work benefits their community for the better. We’ve achieved this by starting up “Time off to volunteer” schemes, which has seen staff working at food-banks during the early days of the pandemic, arranging team charity fundraising opportunities (one client achieved the John O’Groats to Lands End distance challenge in one day by giving staff the full day off to exercise and log their miles) and match-funding for charitable causes.
The Clients I work with have continued in their commitment to shaping culture and have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to tweak this far beyond what they did before. It is clear we’ve had to adapt and those who have done this quickly have seen retention rates improve and engagement levels maintained far beyond those who have ignored that impact of the change of working environments. That’s where I have come in; working from the side-lines to offer support and suggest solutions to improve workplaces for everyone within the organisation, keeping teams stable and ensuring it’s still a great place to work, even when working from home.
If you’d like to discuss your culture and how this can be improved, please get in touch.
