Will COVID-19 Kill Workplace Culture?

In this article, you'll learn:

• How workplace culture is defined and why it matters, even in a remote setting.
• Key questions to help define your company's unique culture.
• The challenges of maintaining workplace culture in a virtual environment.
• How embracing video communication can help reinforce culture remotely.
• Strategies for protecting and sustaining workplace culture during and after COVID-19.

Zoom shirts. Masks. Man caves and she sheds converted into fully equipped home offices. And turning commute time into meeting time on an extended workday. For many workers, returning to the office isn't happening any time soon. And for some, it might never happen.

In a world where we don't go to the workplace, what happens to workplace culture? Can it be saved? And does it matter?
 

Understanding Workplace Culture

According to the Society for Human Resources Management, your workplace culture is the set of shared values and beliefs that define how people at your company behave. It's the how and the why behind how people interact.

Workplace culture gets built when your workers see your leadership. It gets reinforced when they behave accordingly and when you help bring those who are out of the fold back into it. And it splinters when it isn't reinforced. This is the challenge that the move towards more working from home brings.

Go and re-read the first sentence of this section, though. Workplace culture isn't about free lunches on Friday, or about Biophilic design in your common areas. Your culture isn't the types of computers you offer your workers, whether they have sitting, standing or treadmill desks, and whether your fridge is stocked with beer, kombucha, cold brew, or nothing.  All of those trappings of many modern workplaces are expressions of your culture.

They aren't the only expression, though.  And you can send cultural messages without perks -- or physical presence.

Defining Workplace Culture

The first step in protecting your workplace's culture from COVID is to understand it.

• What makes your company your company?

• What kinds of conversations do you have?

• Do you use email, Slack, Messenger, phone calls?

• Are your conversations in person, over the telephone, or over video?

• Do you value directness or tact? 

• What's more important -- hours or productivity?

• Are you focused on the whole person, or do you believe in helping people separate their work from their outside life?

• Do you prefer big or small meetings?

• Does leadership communicate directly or through middle management? By memo, email, prerecorded video, conference call, or all-hands video call? Is the floor open for questions?

These questions can help you start to define your culture. Once you do that, it becomes a matter of the behaviors that you can translate to a virtual workplace -- for as long as it is virtual.

Defending Workplace Culture

The challenge that you face in defending your workplace culture post-COVID is in translating those values into a virtual setting.  However, because much of your culture comes from the behaviors that people exhibit on a day to day basis, you can carry those over into the virtual realm. 

One fundamental change in this new work world is the importance of video. Culture (other than a toxic one) can be very hard to convincingly communicate without facial and body language cues. Moving your company to embrace more video both for group meetings and for one-on-one conversations can help you to make sure that your words are delivered with maximum impact through supportive imagery. Zoom "happy hours" are a particularly popular way to keep a "fun" culture alive, since they allow for casual conversation in a simulation of a watering hole.

The transition to working from home makes it harder to maintain workplace culture. It doesn't, however, make it impossible. Companies that understand their culture and that bring intentionality to how they express it and how they police it will be more able to protect it during COVID and beyond.