Reviewing & Reinventing Culture for the New Workplace

Maintaining a strong culture isn’t as simple in remote, hybrid, and evolving environments—but some approaches endure

Culture—”the shared values, belief systems, attitudes and the set of assumptions that people in a workplace share”—is crucial to a company’s long-term success. But a specific culture isn’t always long-term.

External factors, complacent leadership, and new work models can challenge longstanding values and norms, diluting their impact or making them irrelevant. In these cases, leaders must re-evaluate their organizations and adapt.

Let’s look at the benefits of a strong culture, new work models that impact cultures, and ways to keep yours robust and effective.

The importance of organizational culture

Anyone with a work history understands why culture matters. It sets the tone for everything from workloads and available support to rewards, engagement, output, and how individuals get along. But let’s review a few statistics to drive the (research-based) point home:

• A weak culture leads to employee drift and disengagement, and “studies by the Queens School of Business and by the Gallup Organization, [show] disengaged workers had 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, and 60% more errors and defects.”

• Research published at the MIT Sloan Management Review reveals that a “toxic corporate culture […] is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry.”

• Oft-cited Glassdoor research reports that businesses rated highly by employees—driven by strong cultures—outperformed their peers by 115.6%.

We could keep going, citing various stats on retention, engagement, productivity, and hiring. But it suffices to say, as Gallup puts it, “culture is a competitive advantage.”

Unfortunately, the polling organization has also found that only about “2 in 10 U.S. Employees Feel Connected to Their Company’s Culture,” with the latest 2023 number sitting at 22%. Clearly, many businesses have some work to do.

The threats to culture—and opportunities to improve it

The most significant recent change and challenge, by far, has been the shift to remote work and remote/onsite hybrid models. While the number of these arrangements has pulled back somewhat since the pandemic lockdowns, they are here to stay as many companies reduce overhead by lowering commercial real estate costs.

The difficulties in maintaining a robust and connected culture in these scenarios are apparent: fewer in-person interactions make it harder to engage with employees and assess and reinforce the culture. Simply put, someone who shows up to the office only twice a week and shares a desk, or another individual who is never on site, doesn’t absorb the workplace values in the same way.

That said, the challenges to maintaining culture go beyond the rise of remote and hybrid work. Any company can lose its grip on it due to other workplace changes. Leaders who don’t buy into the culture and merely go through the motions (or don’t even do that), improper evaluation of candidates and employees for fit, and other factors erode any competitive advantage.

Fortunately, many of the steps to preserving and improving organizational culture are the same—whether a business has an all-remote staff or onsite workers who no longer embrace the old way of doing things.

Reimagining culture and redefining it for success

Here are a few key steps to taking your culture’s temperature and adapting it. All of them are related and essential, but the last item is particularly crucial:

1. Assess the current culture and its impact.

Evaluate and recognize how it contributes to your brand and internal and external success. In many cases, this task may require an outside perspective (e.g., from a consultant) because many companies are so embedded in the past that leaders can’t easily see what’s different. A qualified external party with an objective view may say, “No—this is what’s happening, and this is what needs to change.”

2. Take the temperature of your employees.

This effort relies on subjective and objective metrics. For example, declining customer service scores and productivity numbers are hard numbers that point to problems. Similarly, organizations can periodically survey their employees to determine if they are engaged, why or why not, and which aspects of culture must improve.

Finally, asking for feedback in informal conversations is a valuable way to see what’s happening. It necessitates possessing an open and honest culture—but also helps create one.

Note that it may be crucial to provide employees the opportunity to give feedback anonymously. They’ll feel able to criticize constructively without the fear of retaliation or risking their reputation among managers.

3. Communication and interaction are key.

Regularly interfacing with team members is vital for both the evaluation steps mentioned above and the execution stage. And it’s especially important when dealing with the new remote and hybrid work models and their novel hurdles.

This advice isn’t new—consistent communication has long been the fuel for solid cultures. But the methods of doing it have changed with the work models while reemphasizing its importance. For example, it is very easy—often inevitable—for an offsite worker to feel completely disconnected from what is going on.

What is happening with the company? Am I performing up to expectations, and what are they, exactly? What are others working on, and how does it affect me?

The remedy for detachment and cultural erosion is intentional, regular interactions with clear communication. For example, if you were to review a business operating system or optimization book randomly, they all stress the importance of regular, focused meetings. These exchanges become even more critical when someone is rarely face-to-face with colleagues and bosses.

Again, intentional communication is the glue that holds culture together while being necessary for accountability, bidirectional assessment, and teamwork. Don’t let rarely-seen employees drift into ‘outer space,’ regardless of whether they otherwise get their work done and issue no complaints.

Environments, values, and teams need nurturing

Every company benefits from a strong, positive culture, although the details vary. Some organizations may have more flexibility or prioritize customer service, whereas others prize initiative and excellence in specific work products.

In every case, defining and maintaining effective cultures is essential—and both a poor culture and a non-existent one create harmful situations that leaders can’t control. Some specific execution tools have changed in the new work environment, but the principles are timeless.

Assess what’s there. Define what provides the most benefit. And execute with clear-eyed input, consistency, and communication.

Karp HR Solutions helps businesses master the mix of finance and human resources. Contact us today for a free consultation.