3 Ways To Build A Winning Culture

Culture starts with true connections and support

Look around your office today, if you’re even at an office. It’s obvious that the way employees connect with each other has changed drastically. 

The importance of culture is increasing as the standard culture-building activities, like office perks, company retreats, and happy hours, are diminishing. There’s no longer a good reason to dust off the pingpong table in the back room (the reigning champs from the ’16 tournament can rest easy, at least for now).

The point is, physical offices are simply no longer a safety net for building a positive culture. In fact, a recent study reported a 33% increase in the number of U.S. workers saying they will continue working from home compared with pre-COVID-19 expectations.

That means the ways to build a winning culture have changed forever. And, hey, that’s not all bad. 

This fast evolution in the way people interact with each other at work does present risk in the strength of company cultures. And with the employee experience changing so rapidly, the need for fostering a culture where employees feel engaged and motivated has changed too.

But, challenges also open the door for new opportunities and better ways. Remote-friendly engagement strategies play a bigger role now. Company cultures that focus on building better human connections — not impressing interns with a beer keg — will stand the test of time. 

We see WFH or work-with-elbow-bumps and plexiglass culture-building steps look a bit different.

Company culture is driven by the ability of employees to connect. Sharing ideas, experiences, and even pictures of our pets is how we relate to each other. Employees need a consistent channel to connect on a human level, for work-specific and just human moments.

For many companies, the shift to a primarily remote or hybrid workforce has stunted the biggest opportunity to create a sense of community. If sharing appreciation or highlighting a coworker for great work publicly becomes difficult, we’ll lose steam on projects quickly and fail to inspire our best work.

Making employee interaction easier is critical, as in-person channels continue to be impossible. We know mass emails get ignored and Zoom calls fatigue employees. Creating community in a virtual environment requires a layer of communication that feels natural and encourages participation.

Feeling truly connected comes with an understanding of who your coworkers are and the challenges they are faced with. New engagement solutions can help build better connections between employees with personal profiles that share information, such as interests and job responsibilities. Insight into someone’s behaviors and motivators allows teams to work better together — even when in-person interactions are rare.

And that’s a start of a sense of community. Then, you just have to keep going! Regardless of whether you’re working remotely or safely distanced.

Culture leaders are not just the best users of memes and GIFs in Slack or those company-wide emails we all love. They’re often your top performers. These employees are the most engaged, and are intrinsically motivated to drive positive results. The best leaders can inspire their teams to share that same passion, but it’s a skill that takes the right support to develop.

What I often see are top performers thrust into management positions without the skill set to motivate their teams effectively. If young managers get caught up in administrative tasks and don’t have the guidance to support their teams, they risk creating a negative experience — for their employees and themselves. That negative experience becomes an awful impact on culture, reducing engagement (or even retention) in their teams. 

Not only that, but the pandemic has also made it even tougher for managers to support their employees. Without the ability to share appreciation or offer feedback in person, the manager-to-employee relationship suffers. And have you noticed that a lot of the advice for new leaders is all about in-person stuff? 

To prevent culture from suffering now, new platforms are emerging to facilitate actions that develop managers into real leaders, no matter where they’re working.

This technology can help by providing managers with a framework for consistency in their relationships with employees. By making one-on-ones and feedback continuous, managers can connect with their employees to clear blockers in the moment. When managers have open lines of communication with employees, they can better share their own insights and experiences. 

Everyone feels better about that, right?

Waiting for a quarterly review to address problems has never been effective. In fact, it’s just plain sucked! 

Transferring knowledge when it’s actually needed gives managers the ability to help their employees solve problems when it matters. That means managers need technology that provides visibility into the challenges employees face now and the tools to set priorities on areas for improvement in real time.

Platforms that prioritize the human aspect of the manager-to-employee relationship will help build the strongest cultures. By creating opportunities for continuous improvement, companies will see their managers become great leaders.

Everyone knows what it’s like to fake excitement for a bad gift from a distant relative. “Gee, thanks for this amazing dogs playing poker decorative plate set!” 

A great recognition program can’t make that same mistake. The strongest company cultures understand what motivates employees because they understand each employee on a personal level. 

As employees cope with the new working environment, being recognized for their effort in meaningful ways is more important than ever. HR-selected rewards, unused catalog points, and impersonal recognition boards epically fail to communicate what employees appreciate about each other. 

Stop doing that!

To foster a culture of motivation, you must simplify recognition into a single easy-to-use solution and put the power of recognition in the hands of employees.

When individuals can recognize others in their own way — seamlessly — company culture becomes people-centered. Peer recognition, rewards, and service anniversaries that are customized become meaningful and create real impact. 

No junk gifts in sight means people will feel truly appreciated for the work they do. 

The changes in the way people work due to the pandemic have forced companies to rely on the strength of their culture more than ever before. As employees struggle to adapt to new working conditions, companies have a need for better solutions to support their people for the future.

The ways in which companies drive employee engagement and motivation may be rapidly evolving, but the recipe for creating a winning culture has always started with building strong connections and providing support.

You can do that today, and you can do it better. When your employees get meaningful recognition, you can create an even better culture in this new, weird world of work.