Does your nonprofit work remotely or with a hybrid structure?
If so, it’s just as important to pay attention to your team’s culture and how it may be impacted by remote work as it is to develop a strong culture when you’re in the office. While many nonprofits offered remote work pre-Covid, many others found they had to adapt how they worked due to the pandemic. The impact remote work has on culture may surprise organizations.
Remote work brings many benefits, such as better flexibility for team members, cutting back on commutes, and, according to various studies, higher productivity.
On the flip side, growing an effective organizational culture while working remotely is one of the common challenges. Some organizations have struggled, finding that going remote has negatively impacted the culture they built previously.
This kind of impact doesn’t have to be the story of remote work; it shouldn’t be the story of remote culture for your organization. Here’s what you can do to grow an effective culture:
Common Challenges with Remote Culture
One of the most significant impacts of remote work on culture is that people simply don’t see one another anymore and engagement levels drop. Culture naturally develops in an office or other in-person settings as people interact and normalize “how we do things around here.” It’s vital to note that whether you intentionally develop the culture or not, your organization will have a culture.
Values such as teamwork and overall camaraderie tend to be simpler to manage when everyone gets together. There are more casual “water cooler” conversations that help people build engagement, respect, trust, and support.
When everyone works remotely, it’s easier for people to miss out on those connections. Sitting behind a computer can lead to employees focusing more on their tasks than their team. They might lose touch with what’s happening in the group and perhaps not feel as connected to people.
For your nonprofit, those connections are critical if you want your team to work successfully together toward your mission. A healthy organizational culture should be part of your overall strategic plan. When working remotely, find ways to engage your team.
Tips for an Effective Remote Culture
The good news is that with some best practices in place, you can develop a strong, healthy culture, even among a remote-based team. Below are some tips to help make that happen.
Set Up the Right Systems
HelpScout’s Nick Francis says: “A culture’s effectiveness revolves around how information flows. Everyone needs to feel like they have access to the same information, but remote and co-located cultures share information differently.”
In a remote environment, your channels of communication become more important than ever. You must have systems and tools in place that make the exchange of information easy for your team, and promote keeping everyone in the loop. There are no impromptu stand-up meetings or chats as you pass by someone’s desk. Your online communication channels need to serve those purposes.
We commonly rely on email, but it doesn’t cut it as a tool for facilitating easy information flow in a remote environment. “Chatting” via email can be awkward. Inboxes are often overflowing, and it’s easy for important messages to get buried.
Consider your needs for remote meetings and enhance the ability for people to chat. Apps such as Slack tend to stand in nicely for chat, but you should have a structured setup of channels so that conversations are easy to track. It’s less effective for more complex discussions.
For remote meetings, video calling apps can help everyone put a face and voice to each name. Zoom usage boomed over Covid, but other apps are also worth considering.
What about keeping track of projects and resources? A project management tool tends to be the best way to keep everything in one centralized spot. They have the advantage of giving a clear overview of project status while ensuring accountability is maintained by assigning names and due dates to tasks.
Mission Met Center is a tool that documents and tracks your nonprofit’s strategic plan. Inviting all team members to view and engage in the organization’s strategy will help foster a positive culture where everyone feels their voice can be heard and it is valued.
Have Clear Policies and Practices
You want a remote culture where people follow standard policies and practices, developing a shared understanding of what team members should be doing. Handbooks are a great place to share this information. Some particular things to be clear about include:
Expectations around availability. If you have flexible working hours, are there times when people must be available? What about communication outside of work hours? It’s easy for people to pick up phones or laptops and check in at weekends or during evenings. Still, if that’s not necessary, it’s essential to discourage communication during this time. When people see an email sent on Friday evening, they may feel pressure to respond because they’ve seen it. Not having enough time to “switch off” is a common cause of burnout.
Expectations around when and how to communicate. For example, on projects where one person must complete a task before handing it to the next person for their part, how should they communicate? How should people communicate (and to whom) if they need to take a sick day or sign off early?
Communication response times. How soon do you expect a response? When do you not expect a response? (E.g., evenings and weekends). As with a co-located office, you should also have policies to protect team members from unwanted communications (such as shares that are “not safe for work”).
Communication with clients and donors. You need a shared understanding of how to communicate with donors and clients. Your organization should aim to give a consistent experience.
Security and technology. What are your policies and practices around system security and looking after the organization’s own technology?
Training and storage of information. How will information be stored so that people can access it if necessary? What will you do when onboarding new team members to ensure they feel part of the team and get access to the information they need? Consider that having access to the information necessary to help them do their job well is a key component to people feeling comfortable in their roles.
Developing a remote team culture? Clear policies and practices are important for getting everyone on the same page.
Have Regular Check-ins
There’s always a danger of team members feeling isolated when they work remotely. You’ll have some people who absolutely love it, while others wish they could have some more “people time.” Regular check-ins can help everyone to stay motivated, no matter how they feel about working remotely. A few practices that some remote-based nonprofits have in place include:
Morning kickoff meetings. This tends to be short - no longer than 15 minutes - and is used to set up the priorities of the day, and report back on anything from yesterday.
Weekly or fortnightly meetings. A “meeting for the sake of a meeting” doesn’t tend to have positive impacts on team culture, so if you don’t need daily meetings, sometimes weekly or fortnightly will do. The idea is still to get your team face-to-face.
Encouraging team members to keep an up-to-date status on apps such as Slack. For example, you can show yourself as active, away, or busy.
Don’t forget the importance of 1:1 meetings where an employee and supervisor can build a positive work foundation. The 1:1 should be an opportunity to get to know each other well and provide a forum where everyone can safely speak up.
Find Ways to Foster Teamwork
Co-located teams tend to do things such as have celebrations at the office or even socialize outside of the office. This helps them to develop those casual relationships that can build a strong culture.
You can take some of these concepts and bring them to the remote environment, too. For example, celebrating success is still just as important. It can be as simple as making a congratulatory announcement, or you could arrange a remote team lunch or coffee break.
Some other ways teamwork can be fostered remotely include:
Team challenges. Things such as trivia quizzes or show and tell are fun ways to start meetings.
Team meet-ups. Consider arranging in-person meet-ups or team retreats. These can be great for helping develop strong relationships. If keeping things remote, host a lunch get-together where everyone can eat and chat about nonwork related topics.
Surprise treats. You could surprise team members at random with small tokens of appreciation. Coffee vouchers or gift deliveries are common but you don’t have to spend money to show a team member they are valued. Consider praising individuals in team settings or offer professional development opportunities.
Survey your team to find out what interests them. Most people don’t like “forced fun” environments, so find some activities that people have genuine interest in.
Conclusion
Remote work can make maintaining a solid culture challenging, but you don’t have to sacrifice culture to have a remote-based team in your nonprofit.
Having the right tools, systems, processes, and practices to foster communication and teamwork can go a long way toward developing a solid culture. Of course, as nonprofit leadership, you need to show up too. You need to be active and intentional about “showing the way” toward the type of culture you want to build.
Lastly, remember the interrelationship between culture and strategy. Your strategy will absolutely be impacted by your culture and vice versa. Include cultural planning in your strategic plan to ensure your remote team is at its most effective.