Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we have all had to leave the office behind and do remote working from home. Since lockdown began, a lot of people have wondered that this may be the way forward. Why do we need an office space when people can do all their work at home?
In fact, Twitter has offered its employees the choice to work from home forever if they wanted to! Looks like home working is the future for a lot of firms….
Wait just one minute!
The one thing you cannot create at home is an office culture. Your employees will be working individually with countless distractions there wouldn’t be at home: the fridge, children, dogs etc. In turn, this affects your team’s performance.
But even putting how much they get done to one side, there are a lot more reasons on the social side of office/company culture that are lost when some or all of your team are at home:
- It is in our biology that we are social animals. Humans perform best in groups whether it be for forging new relationships or working on your next big project. There is nothing that compares to face to face contact
- It is hard for a leopard to change its spots – or for a company to change its DNA. While we have become accustomed and adapted well to working from home, it was a little jarring when the lockdowns started.
- You may risk certain staff feeling clueless as they are not in the office all the time, and it is much harder to get those people invested in your company culture
- You may need to make more of an effort to maintain your company culture, possibly provide extra resources than you would perhaps have needed to before. This could be a waste of both money and time
- Think of the logistics – who’s in the office on what days? Who’s working from home on certain days? Have they been supplied a laptop from the company set up with all the passwords they need? Do you need to supply more of that and other equipment?
If you are thinking of implanting changes, whether it be more working from home or bringing people back into the office, make it as gradual as possible. You don’t want a fiasco similar to Yahoo’s! https://distantjob.com/blog/yeah-but-yahoo-learning-from-remote-works-biggest-fail/
After all this remote working, you may even need to get your team reacquainted. For ideas on how we can help, read more on our Corporate blog here: Corporate Events Archives | The Wellbeing Farm Wedding and Events Venue
