Keep Your Team Together While Working Apart

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog post by Marc Rosenberg.

Many individuals across the country are now working from home. With such a quick shift to remote work, maintaining your culture may feel like a lost cause. However, there are many ways to promote a strong culture in a work-from-home environment.

1. Use more video – Encourage people to use their webcams when meeting, even if it’s a one-on-one call. Seeing someone else’s face adds an entirely new dimension to your conversation.

2. Encourage virtual social hours – Suggest to your team that they schedule social time using your video meeting platforms as the vehicle for connecting. Examples can include lunches in a video “lunchroom,” an after-work happy hour or “meet the family” / “meet the pets” gatherings.

3. Create a mechanism for employee updates within teams – Convergence Coaching uses its weekly work-to-do communication to share personal updates and prayer requests with our team members.

4. Start a “feel good” forum – Create a space where employees can share positive, uplifting things or resources with others (quotes, musings, work-appropriate jokes, tips and ideas for keeping kids busy at home, recipes)

5. Encourage phone meetings – Schedule phone calls with various team members to discuss client work or other projects you’re working on together, then write an email recap of the discussion so you’re both on the same page.

6. Celebrate and acknowledge team members – Find new creative ways to celebrate employee birthdays, accomplishments in the workplace or in their personal life, and anything else that might be happening.

7. Find creative new ways to maintain office traditions – Does your team hold a quarterly “food” day? Schedule one like you normally would, take pictures and share the recipe for others to try.

For the complete article, read “Maintaining a Strong Culture While Working Remote.”

From Convergence Coaching, Inspired Ideas Blog, March 25, 2020, https://convergencecoaching.com/blog/.