Working Remote? 9 Tips for Maintaining Company Culture

I guess our culture isn’t just pizza parties and beanbag chairs (or as we like to call them ‘boneless couches’).. We actually have to come up with substantive stuff like ‘core values’ and ‘clear defined priorities’ and ‘key performance indicators’Just kidding - I love this shit… here’s 9 ACTIONABLE TIPS to maintain company culture while working remotely. According to an article on Inc.com 3 Ways Company Culture Directly Impacts Your Bottom Line – in addition to making a company more fun to work at, a strong company culture is strongly associated with profit…If you didn’t care about company culture before the pandemic – it might be a great time to start. Micro-managing is really hard when everyone has access to Netflix at their fingertips and no supervision.What are your core values? Will they carry you? What kind of fun challenges, new habits, and infrastructure can you put in place when nothing else matters but the work.1. NOW MORE THAN EVER – PEOPLE NEED CLEAR WEEKLY GOALS AND STRUCTURE AROUND ACCOUNTABILITYWe love Traction/EOS’s structure, and have quarterly goals and check in on weekly habits with our teams on how we did each week. Everyone has 3 rocks – that are all tied to our companies top goals around effectiveness, client acquisition, and profit. 2. INCREASE CHECK-IN’SYou may not have done one on one’s with everyone before - but you might want to get some more in. 3. WORK FROM HOME BINGOWe have a template for this at the full blog post on this topic - hookagency.com/remote. + prizes can be gift cards for local restaurants at a time when they need our support. 4. SLACK, ZOOM, & getting your remote tools tightened up5. GIFS, MEME’S, #RANDOM SLACK CHANNELI love giphy maker for making my own gifs :) If you’re not a millenial, wouldn’t be a bad time to brush up on meme culture (my favorite meme account is @middleclassfancy on Instagram.)6. HUMOROUS GAMES + HAPPY HOURSWe absolutely loved Tee K0’s tee-shirt game – comment below if you have any other great remote games and I’ll credit you and add them to the list on our post! 7. DON’T IGNORE THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF ISOLATION, BE THERE FOR PEOPLEWe know that there isn’t just positive stuff going on during all of this – and if you are good with working from home – some other people may not be. Check-in with each employee to see how they are handling it, and do rhythmic, rolling check-ins every couple of weeks8. DAILY INSTAGRAM TAKEOVER BY EMPLOYEESIf you want to go this route - we included prompts on the blog post!  You want to give people some structure so it’s more fun for them! Shout out to Augurian, another local agency - saw them do this, so thanks for the inspiration guys :) 9. ASK IF PEOPLE NEED ANYTHING AND GO ABOVE AND BEYONDMike Grinberg of Proofpoint Marketing says they’ve done the following “1. Purchased grocery delivery subscriptions (their choice of Shipt or Instacart). For $100/person it’s well worth it, especially if you have anyone that has extra anxiety about the danger of the virus 2. We just scheduled a wellness workshop, with a health/wellness consultant 3. Mandatory days off – people aren’t really taking time off right now because there is no “vacation” but it’s still important for people to spend some time on themselves, so we are forcing everyone on the team to take a few days off every month”What are you doing to improve your company culture during remote working? Drop a tip below!