Make sure that remote working supercharges your culture — and doesn’t stall it

Culture is the social order of an organisation. It describes the narratives, processes, ways of thinking, values and behaviours that inform what gets done, when, and how.

Metaphorically speaking, culture might be regarded as the operating system of a company. It often remains hidden and unacknowledged — but it hums away in the background and has a direct bearing on the functioning of every single process in the machine. (In this context you can also substitute “process” with “people”.)

For as long as the concept of work has existed, culture has been forged as a result of an ongoing, often implicit negotiation between people sharing a physical environment about how they prefer to co-exist. Human beings are social creatures. We are neurologically programmed to want to be part of a tribe — and to want to work in ways that are acceptable to that tribe. Culture grows as a direct consequence of these desires. Every individual in an organisation influences culture in some way (although some are more influential than others, by dint of their position in the tribe).

Remote working — a long-standing promise of the revolution in work that technology is enabling — is now an urgent challenge for many organisations. And it can pose a threat to culture for one simple reason: while the shift to remote working is highly visible, the lack of meaningful attention paid to culture by most organisations makes its impact hard to quantify and manage.

But the smart ones have been aware of this shift for a while — and continue to adapt quickly to it.

Canva is a graphic design scale-up valued at $3.2 billion, and one of Australia’s few tech unicorns. Melanie Perkins, its CEO and co-founder, has long been alive to the challenges of remote working. “Since the beginning, we’ve emphasised creating a culture we love, and enjoy working in,” she says. “This same ethos has continued as we’ve moved our entire team online.”

Canva made the shift with some clear guiding principles — to ensure team wellbeing, to support the community in and around the business, and to rally together and grow. “Culture must go far beyond the physical workplace,” says Perkins. She also believes that a scale-up mindset has proven invaluable in the process. “We have adaptable and agile teams that are comfortable with ambiguity. This is proving to be an incredible asset.”

So, how do you preserve and enhance your culture when your people are no longer physically together?

The answer lies in a simple framework called the 4 C’s, which identifies the main pillars of successful remote working: contextual clarity, companionship, conflict management and communication. This framework — which my practice has developed and tested with leading organisations around the world — provides a foundation for leaders to continue to design and manage a culture in which their people can perform at their brilliant best, regardless of physical location.

Contextual clarity

Contextual clarity refers to how well a workforce understands what is happening and why. The golden rule: in the absence of such clarity, people are likely to believe the worst or the weirdest thing. Human beings are meaning-making machines; without a straightforward narrative, we are prone to all kinds of make-believe.

“It’s critical to ensure that we all communicate regularly and provide context,” says Perkins. Time-poor leaders who are struggling to navigate change challenges often neglect this critical aspect of cultural management. Remote working is itself a change challenge, but in this context it also acts as a force multiplier: isolated individuals are more likely to start making up stories than they are when they’re with others.

The result of low or no contextual clarity? A lack of unification in the culture, and a wholly inefficient operating system.

The first fix for remote working: ensure that you have a daily all-hands conference call, to update on major developments, address exceptional issues and set expectations. Convening a longer huddle each week is also advisable.

Companionship

Remote working can challenge our innate need for human warmth and connection — a need on which the world itself turns. Every day, in every office, you can witness countless acts of companionship — from people making drinks for colleagues to casual enquiries about the weekend; from handshakes to hugs.

Relegate companionship and you relegate a vital sense of connection to others. In an organisational context, this will dilute the humanity of a culture and, as a result, a sense of shared engagement in the company’s mission and values. Smart leaders facing the need for remote working will seek to compensate for this. In simple terms, if you can’t make a coffee for a colleague or hug them hello, what can you do instead?

Ben Adams, CEO at Ben Adams Architects, which is currently working on large-scale projects for Nobu and The Office Group, is a champion of remote working within his firm. He suggests that “you check in morning and evening, and don’t be sparing with praise or encouragement. Everyone is anxious at the moment, and work is a great way to keep things on the level.”

Perkins agrees — and has led her organisation accordingly. “We’ve made a particular effort to ensure that the traditions we have fostered in person have been brought online.” Sharing recipes, launching virtual fitness classes and establishing social clubs are just some of the companionship tools that Canva has deployed. “It’s important we keep the social connection wherever we possibly can,” she says.

The first fix for remote working: quit believing that every interaction has to be exclusively business-focused. Instead, consider how you create an environment in which your people can interact without any implied performance pressure. (This might be a channel on Slack, or smaller team Zoom calls with no agenda.)

Conflict management

Conflict management refers to the extent that interpersonal tensions are managed for the greater good. No organisation can avoid conflict, particularly in conditions of heightened ambiguity. The only question is how quickly and effectively conflict gets resolved.

In our practice, over 90% of organisations are experiencing issues with conflict management when we start working together — some of them severe. Overly “nice” cultures can be particularly toxic in this regard, as they can actively work to stop necessary conversations taking place.

Left unchecked, remote working can exacerbate conflict management issues. Communication can become inefficient; people feel as though they have limited healthy avenues to express their concerns; technology can become a counterproductive substitute for effective communication. Fail to manage conflict amongst your remote workforce, and you will fail to create a resilient, responsive and innovation-focused working culture.

The first fix for remote working: convene a team meeting to discuss how you’re going to enable healthy conflict management. Discuss how to tackle the challenges that come from being physically separated — not least the fact that tone is easy to misconstrue in many forms of non-verbal communication. Consider creating a playbook, or at least some sort of code of conduct to which your team members all agree.

Connection 

People working in resilient and innovation-focused cultures tend to have a high functioning sense of connectedness with others. Remote working can challenge this in novel ways — in particular, how available leaders expect their teams to be, and to what ends.

“It’s critical to ensure that you have the right online tooling to set your team up for success and make collaboration seamless,” says Perkins. “But we’ve also been looking into how we can strike a balance between work and family commitments.”

Connection is not just a matter of fostering work/life balance. In Deep Work, the author Cal Newport describes the importance of being able to focus on tasks that require intense concentration in a distraction-free environment (another phrase for this is “being in flow”.) Strategy, organisational design and ideation are all examples of “deep work” tasks — and, in theory, ones that remote working is well placed to enable.

Yet, without active consideration and management, there is a danger that organisations simply create another form of presenteeism — one that disables their ability to do deep work, and creates greater inefficiency in the operating system.

The first fix for remote working: agree protocols for the use of your communication channels — and specifically the issue of when you expect your team members to be “on” and “off”, and why.

If culture is the operating system of an organisation, the need to transition to remote working represents a significant update to the firmware. And with that update comes choices. The primary one is this: ignore the impact on your culture, and watch productivity suffer — or actively lean in, and transform how you work for good.

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