Good Teambuilding Builds Good Cultures Post Pandemic and Beyond

When immigrants come to America, they often see opportunities, and many become extraordinarily successful entrepreneurs. Many Americans who grow up with these same opportunities fail to see them and therefore neglect taking advantage of them. One thing we do have in common is resistance to change. While an immigrant might find success, the idea of being on time, for example, is a difficult idea to change for some cultures. The changes dictated by the pandemic have given us all change challenges to wrestle. How will these changes, many of which are here to stay, affect our work culture and what changes do we need to embrace for success?

There are many things in life and work that we can and cannot change. Trends come and go. Then there are societal, economic, and even disasters that change our lives forever. Being humans, we adapt. We adapt or we perish in many scenarios. Would you be willing to adapt to keep your company from perishing?

Does Your Communication Need a Facelift?

OK, so we humans haven’t always been so great at adapting our communication skills.  Now, we are facing even greater demands on those skills by building cohesive virtual, onsite, global, part-time, full-time, and culturally different teams. Since cultures are in the first paragraph of this article, let’s begin there.

Are you clearly communicating your policies and procedures? For those cultures with a different mindset about time, are you communicating how we work within schedules and deadlines? Are you clearly illustrating how the time factor fits into the bigger picture? How are you communicating this information?

Are there words and phrases between the cultures your organization works with (including your own) that might be essential to helping clear up directives, processes, or everyday social and business etiquette? Now working virtually, we hear new words and phrases, or old ones being spoken in a different arena. Are you communicating those, because remember, even trends can leave changes in our language good and bad.  Here are some communication ideas:

Keeping your virtual people feeling they are important and included will take extra effort, but it’s worth it.

Take the time to know each employee. This includes their behaviors, skills, attributes, and crucially, what motivates them.

Over communicating is even more important now

Establish communication methods and how different topics should be communicated

Creating mutual interest groups can help build more cohesive and inclusive teams

Is Disengagement Becoming an Engaging Issue?

While onsite workers can fall down the disengagement rabbit hole, the fall is even quicker and deeper for remote workers. Perspectives, assumptions, and the grape vine, (yes, there is even a virtual grape vine), can make people see and hear scenarios that are false, irrelevant, and overly dramatic. There is a saying that goes, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.” Well let’s change (there’s that word again) that up a bit to read: “Keep your employees close but keep your virtual employees closer.”  This can help give you, (and them) a new perspective. 

Keep your recognition and award programs alive and well. As an example, a colleague of mine, Leigh Ann Rodgers, M.Ed., CPF, CVF has many exercises on her website for both virtual and onsite teams. Here is a virtual awards activity you might find useful.

Measure it.

Yes! There are several ways to measure engagement and these ideas help you keep the pulse of engagement levels throughout your organization.

Keeping Track of Time Zones – There are several tools to help keep you in sync with your employees wherever they are.

Pulse Surveys – These surveys help you keep track of engagement through the use of short, on-line surveys . This is just one sample, not a recommendation. You can probably create your own through Survey Monkey

Assessments – OK, here comes the hard sell so you can pass over the section if you want.  Profitability, productivity, employee retention and customer satisfaction are some of the most common benefits correlated with higher engagement scores. You can deliver these to your organization by using assessments that uncover what matters most to everyone. These assessments are new and cutting edge yet are scientifically based on tried-and-true performance measures.

While changes and trends come and go, there will always be room for good teams and good culture. If you would like to have a discussion around these topics, Let's get started