Protecting Your Company Culture Against Covid-19

The World Health Organization has announced that COVID-19 is a pandemic. Most companies in Australia are advising their employees to work from home, canceling face to face meetings and domestic and international travel. With these measures now in place, how do you protect your company culture from COVID-19? Here are three simple tips to ensure you keep a Fit culture.

Communication - When your team members aren’t all together under one roof, it’s important to have a single place where everyone can go to get information such as the company intranet or cloud-based document sharing platforms such as Dropbox or Google Drive. These are a great place to post the company’s latest updates, policies, and procedures. Companies should look to increase their communication via emails, newsletters, social media, and apps. Virtual meetings are key. If you are a leader or manager, you should continue to do your weekly check-ins and team meetings to ensure employees are feeling supported while they are working remotely. 

Leveraging Technology - One of the most important aspects of successfully offering remote work is having the right technology to make sure your employees can do their job effectively. An obvious one is providing laptops, tablets, and smartphones with online IT support to assist with the setup of workstations at home. Invest in communication tools such as video conferencing, group chat rooms and document sharing platforms to keep remote workers looped in. Start-ups such as Slack and Zoom and established giants including Google and Microsoft are offering their tools for free or at a low cost so that teams can have access to real-time visibility of workflows and results to ensure productivity levels remain high. Ensure your full workforce are trained up on these software tools and where gaps are identified then provide training and opportunities for practice before employees need to use them.

Here are some great tools to help your team work better.

Connectivity – Working from home can be lonely. There is no banter with team mates by the photocopier and George your cat isn’t the greatest at bouncing ideas off. Ensure your team is regularly catching up via video or phone and get your team to think of ways to boost morale while working remotely e.g. create a separate channel where team members are encouraged to talk about the most recent TV show they watched, a book they are reading, or a restaurant they tried last week. These social interactions are essential to your team, as it helps them to connect and continue to create real relationships.

Lastly, it is important to ensure you are regularly monitoring and reviewing ways of working to ensure the team is happy and engaged, systems and tools are working effectively and productivity remains consistent. 

Businesses owners and leaders need to consider the future of the workplace and the future needs of our workforce. Once Australia has fought through this crisis, will working remotely be here to stay? If you want to ensure you are keeping your culture Fit through this pandemic, please get in touch with us at CultureFit HR, we can help you create a robust remote working strategy