Remote Workforces and Organizational Culture: a New Challenge (part 1 of 2)

Organizational culture in the post-pandemic labor market is undergoing a transformation. With so many employees shifting gears, re-evaluating their priorities, reflecting on their career aspirations and work-life balance, organizations are asking not only why is this happening but what do we need to do about it? Not only are employees shifting companies at a much higher rate, they are increasingly working from home.  

My theory is that people have a sense that there is something better out there. Whatever dissatisfiers an employee has with their current employer, whether it’s a feeling of being underpaid or undervalued, the grass always looks greener on the other side. 

Maybe we want to believe that the equation is simply about compensation. Companies that have taken their eyes off the compensation ball will surely pay the price through attrition until (maybe) they figure out that every person with skills has agency. Companies that focus primarily (and only) on compensation will feed the transactional nature of the employee’s mindset, and it’s a losing strategy. High-attrition companies will eventually adjust their compensation philosophy to get back to some sense of equilibrium.

More progressive organizations on the other hand (thinking beyond the transactional factor of pay) will examine the reason people seek employment with and remain at their company. If compensation is off the table, then what? What is the glue that holds people and teams together? In short, it’s the organization’s culture. Does the culture nurture its employees, ensure that they feel included, that they belong, recognize their achievements, and promote professional growth?

If an organization embraces the differentiating factor of culture, let’s add another dimension to this conversation. As remote work becomes more and more prominent, we now have to wonder what organizational culture even means anymore. The pandemic forced organizations to be creative and find ways to enable employees to be productive while working from their homes. The unintended consequence however, was that the organizational glue, its culture, suddenly looked different. 

How does an employee sitting in their home office, isolated from all of the trappings of organizational life feel connected to anything remotely resembling organizational culture? The socialization that we took for granted, the water cooler talk, and the lunches where gossip and grievances were aired were no longer to be found. Office humor, body language, and impromptu drop-ins all served to socialize employees and convey a sense of belonging and status. These social connectors provided a common understanding of the organization’s culture, but with remote work, their power to give meaning went away (or at least decreased substantially). 

 

When Edgar Schein wrote his (1992) seminal work on organizational culture, it became the most influential piece of research that shaped our understanding of organizational life. Schein defined culture as: 

 

A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. 

 

The underlying assumption was that the employee group was working together in a physical sense. Through their interaction and exposure over time, employees picked up on shared values, explicit versus implicit rules to live by, basic assumptions, and shared meanings. This is where we pick up on cues around dynamics such as the meaning of time, the way we learn from mistakes (or weaponize them), the way employees get noticed, the way change happens, the way resistance to change looks, and the way innovation and improvement looks, to name a few. 

 

A lot of organizations misunderstand or dismiss their role in establishing and maintaining a cultural identity. There might be a brief discussion at Orientation for new employees to hear about the explicit ideal culture, but afterwards, they are left to figure out the tacit culture that awaits them. We’ve probably all gone through this experience where, after getting the we are like one big family speech, you shortly thereafter observe the Game of Thrones cutthroat politics that pervades. 

 

In addition to a weak cultural footprint at Orientation, talent management doesn’t sustain a focus on the ideal culture, employees are not held accountable to uphold the ideal cultural footprint, nor are they selected, promoted, or fired based on the explicit cultural ideals. So is it any mystery as to why leaders see fail to see the organization’s stated values as their values? 

 

The big question then is what does organizational culture in a growing remote workforce even look like? If my main connection to an organization is through email and occasional Zoom meetings, clearly a significant amount of socialization is missing. 

 

The new challenge for organizational development is how to restructure organizational systems and processes to forge a new cultural connection with both its onsite and remote workforces.