If you own and operate a remote business with employees all over the globe, it can be easy to overlook the importance of your company’s overall work culture. However, organizational culture is so important, as it helps companies draw and retain the best employees.
This directly translates into business success, because if staff members love their workplace culture, they will be motivated to stay and grow with their company. Their high morale will also motivate them to work hard to help the business thrive.
So having an inspiring and supportive organizational culture is crucial for reducing turnover and motivating employees. If you are wondering how to ensure a positive and growth-oriented work culture in your remote enterprise, I’ve got you covered!
In my experience as the creator of the 9 Year Letter™ Method (a goal-setting system for the 4 pillars of life – relationships, financial, health and fun) I have discovered these 5 ways to ensure a fantastic remote work culture:
Know Your Role as the Enterprise’s Leader
As the business owner and/or CEO, you hold a critical role in the creation of your enterprise’s culture: setting the company’s vision and long-term goals and ensuring that all major business decisions are in the best interest of achieving those aspirations.
This in turn helps to create the company’s culture, as your business will both attract talent who are also passionate about the vision and retain current employees that admire how your company stays true to its ideals.
In addition, every business’s leader must ensure that all other executives are doing whatever they can to keep morale high throughout the company. Thus, it is vital that you meet with your department leaders on a regular basis to see how they can maintain a positive company culture and boost their team members’ morale.
As the enterprise’s leader, you can also increase morale just by getting to know everyone in the business by name (if it isn’t a massive corporation) and seeing how they are doing on a regular basis. This will help all of your employees feel valued.
Prioritize Servant Leadership
A servant leader fully supports their workforce and ensures that they have all of the info and assets they need to do their jobs well, and they also place a great focus on the mental wellbeing of their team members. This helps the employees feel valued and supported.
Servant leaders make a concerted effort to check in with their team members regularly just to see how they are doing and to provide support and assistance however they can. A servant leader can make a huge, positive impact on the remote workplace.
When all of a business’s workers are remote, it can be easy for employees to get confused as to what exactly they should be working on in any given moment, how to do a task, and who else to ask about certain projects. Also, in a remote work environment, team leaders don’t see their employees every day so they may not be aware of any stress, anxiety, or frustration they may be dealing with.
Servant leaders prioritize their team members’ wellbeing and happiness over just trying to make sure each employee reaches their KPIs each month.
Amplify Morale with Internal Communication
Employees of remote enterprises don’t interact with their coworkers in-person on a regular basis — many have never even met them in real life! However, employee connection and feeling supported are vital for creating a positive work environment.
Since your employees do not interact with each other in-person, one way you can help them connect is by ensuring there are effective channels for them to communicate with each other. And this doesn’t just pertain to discussions about work tasks and projects — implement internal channels that allow them to have conversations about their hobbies and other topics aside from work.
You may think that this is counter-intuitive, but by providing communication channels like post-work virtual happy hours, Google Hangouts, and designated Slack channels on random topics, you will help your employees better connect with each other.
This will help them become more comfortable around each other and feel like they are friends who uplift and provide support when times are hard, not just work associates. Ultimately, this can also help improve the overall communication and collaboration across your entire enterprise.
Empower Your Employees
If you want to create a positive work environment in your remote business, it is crucial to make sure that your employees know their opinions and ideas really matter. Empower them by sending out surveys and providing employee suggestion boxes for team members to share their thoughts and concerns about projects, the company as a whole, etc.
This helps employees know that their voices are being heard and that they are valued members of the organization. They will feel much more empowered to strive for positive, impactful change in the company.
Provide Opportunities for Growth
If you want to create a positive work culture in your business, ensure that there are opportunities for your employees to continually grow. The best employees quit working at companies because they do not see how they can progress further in their career if they were to stay.
They don’t see any opportunities for growth and feel like their career has reached a standstill. They want to continually challenge their abilities and grow, but they do not do that in the business they are at.
To combat this scenario and prevent your best employees from quitting, constantly assess ways to help your team members ‘level up’ and grow professionally. For example, you can invest in your employees by paying for them to get specialized training that will allow them to take on more challenging projects.
One way to do this is by helping your employees learn a new language that will allow them to work in global branches of your business. Or, you can create new positions for employees and regularly ask them what kinds of projects they would like to focus on.
Meet with each of your employees via video chat to ask about their career aspirations and see how you can make them happen. You won’t know what kinds of goals they have and where they hope to go in the future if you don’t ask them! You may find out that one employee has been wanting to take on a whole new project for a while, and another really wants to be considered for a promotion.
Showing your employees that you care about their wellbeing and future will really help ramp up morale across your business.
To Wrap It All Up
A positive work culture is vital for retaining your best employees and helping your remote business progress and reach new heights. As the business’s leader, one way you can influence your company’s work culture is by making sure the other executives in your enterprise are doing whatever they can to keep morale high in their teams.
Also, you can amplify morale by providing channels for internal communication, empowering your team members, and providing opportunities for growth. Following these tips should help you create and maintain a positive, growth-minded culture that will help your enterprise maximize its potential.
By: Ray Blakney
