Shailesh Rajpal – Strengthening Corporate Culture in the Age of Remote Work

Posted by Shailesh Rajpal on February 20th, 2022

Why is a healthy organizational culture more crucial now than ever? It’s one of the things that makes your employees look forward to coming into work and interacting with their colleagues each day. And in the midst of a wide-open job market and the Great Resignation, that can mean the difference between retaining your top performers or watching them walk out the door.

Mr. Shailesh Rajpal says, “Nurturing corporate culture in the age of remote work takes a little extra effort, but it’s essential to retaining your best people. Plus, it gives you a potentially powerful advantage in attracting the talent your business needs in an intensely competitive hiring market”.

Ways to foster on-site, hybrid and remote work culture

Whether your teams work on-site, remotely or in a hybrid workplace, if you aren’t actively promoting your company culture, you risk having what you’ve built slowly fall apart.

Mr. Shailesh Rajpal being the CEO and Founder of Rajpal Group of Companies gives tips to helping keep it strong regardless of where your employees work:

1. Start with trust, and don\'t micromanage: Trust is the bedrock of any good organizational culture, especially when managers are physically distanced from their reports. Two years into the pandemic, remote and hybrid workers have long found their groove and expect managers to have confidence in their ability to deliver great work on time. Communicate regularly with your people to ask if they have everything they need.

2. Embrace asynchronous collaboration: Many office culture revolves around real-time interactions, from team meetings to water cooler conversations. Video calls and chat threads allow you to replicate some of this with your distributed team, but too much instant communication can be a distraction and drag down productivity and morale.

3. Stay alert for drops in performance and morale: Top-notch work cultures can rapidly go south if team members start underperforming. Managers of office-based teams can easily spot when individuals are struggling and help them turn things around before the malaise spreads. With remote and hybrid workers, whose struggles may be invisible, you need to be especially vigilant for any signs of stress and low morale.

4. Use tech to help them connect — and disconnect: The ease with which teams stayed connected when offices closed is one of the success stories of the pandemic era. Furthermore, the shift to digital communication can help broaden the conversation in many companies: Those who communicate best in writing can shine in chat threads, while their more talkative colleagues might take the lead in video calls. Encourage everyone to participate in the ways they feel they excel the most — or even to push themselves outside their comfort zones and speak up in different channels.