How to preserve your corporate culture during this working-from-home episode

COVID-19 keeps shaking up companies' sales everywhere on the planet, from the operation side to corporate culture. Even if your business is organized and easily allows teleworking, this period is the ultimate test to discover if you possess the right tools to apply it on a larger scale and for an extended period.

▸ Read our Covid-19 special advisory report

Even if, during that period, teleworking allows businesses and their employees to function from a distance, it also comes with its share of challenges.

This crisis is a unique opportunity to strengthen your team in order to unite your people and be present for everyone.

Corporate culture is more so defined by the way a team is capable of confronting moments of storms than by how it reacts when everything is peaceful. It is even more accurate when the repercussions are so unfavourable that you need to let go of a few of your most valuable and committed employees to survive the current crisis.

"For the first time, we had to move a few of our talented people to the position of observers, people who embodied the agency's values and were contributing in their way to our corporate culture. For weeks and months to come, we have a duty towards them, the duty to continue to embody Republik social standards and work together so they can reintegrate our team."

-Vincent Fortin, President of Republik

Maintaining corporate culture during this period of crisis will help your company to come back faster and better than ever. Here are a few ideas that might help you live your social, corporate culture despite the distance.

Stay active even at home

• Transpose your yoga class or your lunch workout online or live on Facebook. Share the word and make it a group activity;
• Do not stay put all day. Create a stand-up meeting, take a dance pause during a brainstorm or take a walk.

Keep your hopes up

• Share the good moves of others in a Slack channel so that everyone feels valued when they accomplish something;
• Honour your meetings. Keep your individual sessions or have lunch all together;
• Volunteer to help your colleagues overcome their challenges, even if they are not a part of your initial task;

Don't take yourself too seriously

• Maintain Thursday's happy hour! Experience it through Google Hangout or Zoom. Everyone has to join with a beer in hands;
• Surprise your colleagues with funny backdrops or costume when connecting to your next online meeting;
• Create GIFs of your colleagues to keep your Slack channels alive;
• Prank them from a distance. Be creative!

Talk about something else than your job

• Put together an apartment tour for your colleagues and let them meet your family, your pets or your roommates;
• Create a book club: everyone has to read the same article or the same book, and then share your impressions;
• Share your Spotify playlist and groove to your teammate's music.

Moreover, here are our practical tips that are helping us stay productive as much as we usually are at the office.

Provide the necessary material to work from home

• We offer compensation for every employee's Internet connection;
• Payment for mobile phones;
• We paid for their taxi home so they could carry their computers and material to their house.

Establish clear communication channels from the start

• We hold a morning meeting with our team every day at 9 am;
• We collect more feedback on our employee's experience via tools like Officevibe;
• Vincent, our president, holds individual meetings with each employee once a week;
• We make sure to name a leader at the beginning of each online meetings, who decides who has the right to speak (because it can get extremely chaotic);
• All of that, while staying sensitive and flexible to everyone's reality.

Having the right tools for a collaborative work

• Project and task management tools like Asana;
• A common online server for online collaborative work and file sharing, like Google Drive;
• A teleconference tool like Google Hangout for all the internal meetings and client's call;
• An internal communication tool like Slack;
• Phone service at the office that redirects on mobile phones according to the extension;
• And a Facebook Messenger group with all the employees, for everything that is not Slack approved!

Regardless of your social standards, it is vital to put a few activities in place and any mechanism to help them come to life. Do not think your corporate culture will survive by itself, and please, don't take it for granted.

We need a spirit of solidarity more than ever within our team and in society as well.