Since the COVID pandemic, much focus has fallen on the workplace and organisational culture. With our traditional workspaces upended by restrictions on gathering, a rapid restructuring was required to maintain productivity. To the surprise of many, the crisis-averting changes we made increased productivity.
According to the 2024 article “The Rise in Remote Work since the Pandemic and its Impact on Productivity” by Pabilonia and Redmond, which used statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, vast numbers of workers continued to work remotely as late as 2022. The year 2022 found 39 percent of scientific professionals, those in technical services, information, insurance, and finance, along with those working in the management of companies, working remotely. Those industries with the largest number of remote workers in 2021 maintained over 33 percent of their workforce as remote workers. The astonishing thing was that industries that experienced the largest increases in remote workers also grew in productivity as measured by Total Factor Productivity (TFP) rates.
Despite the productivity boost that accompanied the shift to remote work, many business thought leaders worry that remote work will mean the death of company culture. This concern rests largely on the belief that the shared rituals, values, and connections traditionally supported by physical proximity and a rhythm established by the reliable tempo of the work week and business hours will wilt if transplanted.
As identified by John Kotter in his book, Corporate Culture and Performance (1992), business challenges in corporate culture can come from something as simple and commonplace as a significant amount of company turnover. Thus, it is understandable that many invested in corporate health would worry about the significant transitions adopted in response to an international pandemic. Many voiced concerns focus on a breakdown of an idealised view of organisational culture. These concerns include fear of a breakdown in role modelling, conveying norms of worker behaviours, and consistency in how work problems are dealt with when there is no physical proximity between workers. However, when you look at worker satisfaction and engagement pre-pandemic, it is clear that, in many cases, these problems predate the vast shifts to remote work.
Kotter shares that an organisation’s culture can be stabilised through concerted efforts. Variables associated with a strong and stable corporate culture include a strong interconnection of shared values, corporate practices, and consistent patterns of behaviour. According to Kotter, this stability is strengthened through consistent leadership, stable memberships within the work group, small group size, group success, and geographical concentration. All of these variables can be maintained despite a shift to remote work, except geographical concentration, which had already been stretched through technology to expand workgroups across vast spaces.
Despite the historical belief that physical proximity is required to maintain a thriving corporate culture, many corporate leaders conceded that other elements are more impactful in maintaining a healthy organisational culture than simply gathering your workers together in one place. Indeed, research indicates that in many instances, on-site workers share that they feel less cultural connection to their organisation than remote or hybrid workers do.
Since simply ordering on-site work is not the one-and-done answer to promoting a strong corporate culture that many appear to wish it were, how do you ensure a strong organisational culture in these chaotic times?
The MIT Sloan School of Management has shared its take on how to maintain a healthy organisational culture as the workplace moves toward a new normal at several points since the shakeup in working practices. Looking at research from 2020 to 2024, we can extrapolate several practices that will not only improve your culture despite the changes in the workplace but correctly implemented, may connect your teams on a level beyond what they felt before changes in the workplace.
1. Make your organisational culture visible
Aspects of corporate culture may go unnoticed when people work remotely. Having your leadership team take the time to build relationships with remote workers, such that they can identify individual examples of success and effort that exemplify organisational values, will go a long way to improving awareness of your unique culture. Rewarding examples of behaviours that support organisational values publicly will make your shared organisational values increasingly salient to everyone within the organisation. However, rewarding organisational values publicly will do much more than build improved awareness of organisational values. Making rewards public will increase the stability of your organisational culture and ensure that these, now highly salient, behaviours increase in frequency.
2. Make your organisation a lifelong learner
Look to other fields and adopt the practices that improved outcomes within their arenas. For example, adopting the best practices exhibited in education arenas for building community and encouraging individual input despite the move to Zoom classrooms will help you maintain individual input, creativity, and cross-pollination of ideas on an organisational level.
3. Use what those in psychology have learned about improving individual growth mindsets on an organisational level
Creating a growth mindset on an organisational level will support corporate health and team integration, aka stable organisational culture, just as an individual growth mindset supports an individual’s health and ability to thrive. Simple ways to encourage a growth mindset on an organisational level include providing opportunities for group reflection and continued learning.
4. Make your organisational history a strong part of your rhetoric
Focusing on your organisation’s past, values, and successes will solidify each individual’s understanding of your distinct culture and provide a cultural touchstone with which they can feel connected in these chaotic times. Focusing on historical aspects of who you are as an organisation may well improve worker commitment to your organisational goals beyond pre-pandemic levels.
Despite much concern over the potential negatives associated with the move away from the traditional workplace, it is clear that, for organisations and leaders willing to learn and grow, this move may allow for strengthening and enhancement of organisations that meet the challenges head-on. Implementing what other fields and organisations have developed to stand this test can make your organisation strong, stable, and inspirational as you excel in these chaotic times.
