How the New Normal Will Affect Organizational Culture
We've received a lot of questions concerning company culture and how the new normal will affect the culture we worked so hard to either build or are working to maintain. Especially now that we are seeing so much change - the push to telecommuting, remote working, relying on new technologies, key buzzwords, and zoom fatigue. How do we then have the same level of connection? The same level of culture? The same level of approach to how we interface with our clients and our employees than we did before? This could be an ideal opportunity for you to look at what the key characteristics are of your culture and what you've spent a lot of time and years really focused on creating.
Do you have a more customer first white glove treatment or is your culture more defined on your employees family-oriented environment? The stronger your culture the more cohesive it is, the higher probability you have that you can then navigate any kind of change whether it's a societal or technology-based.
Regardless how strong your culture is, it has to have enough flexibility to be able to survive that change. Does it transition to telecommuting? Does a transition to a remote workforce effect or kill your culture? Or can it make it stronger?
This could be the time to identify what you want to preserve and then look at the new normal, look at the changes and see how you want to transition what you've built into the new environment because this won't be the last change certainly and it might not be the most disruptive but we can apply our lessons from this one to the next.
If you have a client focused culture, was it the fresh coffee? Was it that immediate attention that you gave them? That sense of comfort or was it simply knowing that they were in a comfortable environment?
Taking the lessons of this pandemic and times of uncertainty, we can boil down and decide how we can give that white glove treatment in any environment. Similarly, if you have a more employee focused environment, was it the day-to-day interactions that made it possible? Was it flexibility? Was it an open office environment or allowing family into the office? We can have those same desires and goals for our culture, all we have to do is transition into a more technology, a more web-based application so that in the next transition, we know what the key characteristics are, what we want to preserve, and then how we can apply it in the new digital world.