In a world where Zoom meetings and Slack messages have replaced hallway conversations, team culture is evolving faster than we can say ‘You’re on mute! Both during and following the pandemic it was amazing to see how many people demonstrated agility and the willingness to adapt to new work patterns. Across the workforce, we saw people step up and engage in new ways of working.
While company culture in some sectors more obviously lent themselves to remote working, there were many more surprising success stories. We even saw one of our clients (rail company) who were able to have controllers and operators scheduling trains and controlling the train network from home. When you think about it, that’s mind-boggling.
According to recent figures published by Forbes, before the pandemic just 4.7% of UK employees worked from home and by April 2020, 46.6% of employees did at least part of their job from home. In 2024, that picture seems to have stabilised, with 14% working only from home, and 26% working from home some of the time.
So, in the years since the pandemic forced changes, we’ve all been talking about and settling into the ‘new norm’, and in many cases – enabled by technology – it works well.
But we need to exercise caution and recognise that everything has a cost. Often, it’s the costs that we can’t quantify that we overlook but just because it doesn’t show up on the forecast, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. For organisations whose new norm centres around working from home, making innumerable virtual calls, one thing that may be compromised is team culture!
But can you really manage, change and nurture culture via Zoom?
It’s well known that many organisations struggle to create desired values and behaviours, such as good morale, mutual respect, collaboration and employee engagement, when the workforce is together in communal spaces and team meetings.
So how much more difficult is organisational success when teams are scattered and individuals are physically disconnected, operating from their front rooms, kitchens and bedrooms?
Many people have started new jobs and after months, or even years, have never physically met their manager or colleagues.
We have witnessed some innovative ways of inducting people into new roles. But inductions give insights, they are not a full introduction to team culture. They do not represent the lived experience of ‘who’ we are and ‘how’ we are.
Culture requires connectivity and community
The construct of organisations is going to bear heavily on culture. In his book The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society, Charles Handy talks of the contractual organisation, where fewer people are directly employed, but instead contract their services. The benefits for the organisation are reduced overheads and greater agility.
But the downside of a contractual organisation is the loss of a sense of community and barriers to commitment. It’s very hard to embed core values; and what incentive is there for loyalty? From the contractor’s perspective it’s hard to go the extra mile for one organisation when you’re committed to 2 or 3 others.
Culture requires understanding
Another important factor is understanding the characteristics of your organisation’s culture.
The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture, (Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price and J. Yo-Jud Cheng, published by Harvard Business Review) found, when they mapped cultures along two dimensions, eight characteristics emerge: how people interact (independence to interdependence) and their response to change (flexibility to stability).
While it’s important to understand that none of these organisational characteristics is seen as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others, some of them will allow more agile adjustment to change (learning, caring, purpose) than others (authority, order).
It means some organisations need to be more intentional than others. For those where more thought is required, external help will be needed, because the skills, competency and mindsets will not sit naturally within the leadership pool.
Where do we go from here?
We spoke with a CEO with roles in different organisations, who said that he could actually switch from working with one company to another and be in the same room. But where does that leave the lived experience, the sense of belonging?
We don’t deny the existence of a new norm, and we love the challenge of ‘new’.
But if you want to maintain your uniqueness as an organisation, you will need to be far more intentional about really understanding what your organisational culture is. How does this culture migrate and translate to a virtual world, and how do we adapt to the remote without losing our essence?
The workplace has been redefined. The idea of commuting to a central location is no longer an automatic expectation for many people. But even working from home can test your tolerance. As we’ve seen in the last few years, for some, it can be a lonely, isolating experience and on the other side of the spectrum it can be difficult for those with children and busy households.
There is something enriching and exciting about knowing that you can share a space with a creative, a developer, a social worker and a Head of HR for a global brand. There’s an excitement about working together under one roof that organisations still find difficult to replicate remotely.
We believe that experience of working together can bring a richness of sharing, connectivity and creativity. But such associations only enrich us if everyone can bring their cultural nuances to the party.
As an organisational change consultancy, we recognise the importance of not only adapting to change but preparing for and designing change. We are working with organisations to design and implement their culture in a virtual work environment.
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