In today’s business environment of highly specialized routine delegation, integrating a remote team is becoming an increasingly viable growth strategy. However, one challenge organizations may discover is properly maintaining your specific company culture and goals throughout the entire range of your remote workforce.
Yet while it may indeed be a challenge in our online business world, there are a number of efficient and effective methods to ensure that organizations can align their cultural identity and succeed amongst remote teams. Here are a few key points to keep in mind:
Integrate Your Company Culture Through Consistent Communication
One of the clearest benefits of working with any remote team will always be ease of communication. You can get started by setting up a regular schedule of email updates which remind, reinforce and then continually promote your company’s cultural progress. This schedule can be weekly, monthly or even bi-annually)
It’s always absolutely crucial that you reply in a timely manner to any and all questions, queries or requests for clarification regarding your scheduled updates to keep remote teams informed.
Update Remote Employees via Online Platforms
One of the more helpful—and most immediate—methods to ensure ongoing success is to ensure that any and every member of your remote team is consistently updated regarding both your company’s short and long-term goals. This can be achieved via routine teleconference video meetings (Skype etc.), team conference calls and use of project management platforms (Asana, Trello).
Doing so can go a long way to creating clear, active and meaningful engagement with a team that you may or may not have daily contact with regarding your company’s day-to-day operations. If teams don’t always know where they’re going, it’s far too easy to get lost.
Evaluate & Improve Best Processes
Maintaining active, positive engagement that properly aligns all elements of your remote team with your company’s specific culture and goals also requires mutually beneficial communication.
While regularly updating your remote team is absolutely recommended, without an additional request for feedback regarding any communication issues or ongoing hurdles as a result of those updates, remote teams can start to face new challenges.
And unlike regular organizational updates, feedback requests can, and should, be best taken at a more measured pace. In most cases bi-annually will prove to be sufficient, and in many cases annually may be more than enough to keep your remote team’s structure properly aligned.
This relay of vital information creates exactly the type of engagement that aligns every element of every remote team member with your culture, and your company mission!
Aligning your remote team with your overall company culture can be a challenge as your HR team moves forward into a rapidly changing future. But with a disciplined effort to communicate, promote, and engage, it need never become a challenge whose starting hurdles outweigh its significant positives.