How to Foster a Healthy Online Employee Culture

As the owner or CEO of an enterprise, you may ask why you need to improve the remote work of your staff. The answer is simple: it can motivate, increase productivity, and make them feel happier working in your company. This, in turn, will have a positive effect on your overall business, improving employee retention, increasing productivity, and bringing more profit.

Here’s how you can do it in your organization

1. Set office and offline hours
2. Avoid excessive pressure
3. Support the personality
4. Improve staff knowledge
5. Check employee performance
6. Use fewer video calls
7. Organize one-to-one meetings intermittently
8. Stimulate social interactions
9. Implement the right tools

Tips to cultivate a healthy online employee culture

With every business unique in the needs and requirements of its employees, it’s impossible to create comprehensive list of guidelines for improving employee culture. However, you can choose tips below that can be integrated into your business, or modify them in accordance with your company's rule:.

1. Set regular office and offline hours

While working online, employees may live in different countries or time zones or be constantly on the move, which can cause certain issues in communication or uncoordinated work. Therefore, an organization has to agree on common office hours, which can be either the whole working day or a part of it.

At the same time, employees may need full concentration to complete a task. When they are working online, they may receive emails, messages and calls every ten minutes. This is very distracting and as a result can negatively affect their performance. Therefore, it’s important to set aside "hours of peace" when the employee may refrain from responding to emails, stay offline and fully concentrate on their task.

2. Avoid excessive pressure

Burnout under pressure is a common reason for people to leave their jobs, and it's especially the case for the remote set-up when it's more difficult to divide your personal and working time.

Therefore, businesses should regularly check that they aren't overworking their staff and that everybody is in good shape. Also, it's always a good idea to teach your workers about time-management techniques.

3. Support the personality

By working online, employees can sometimes distance themselves from their teams and common goals, which affects productivity. Therefore, it's important to realize that you hire the personality, not only the skills, and you should do your best as a company to support your staff comprehensively.

This may include gathering employee feedback, leading team-building activities, improving the human resources management as a whole process, adding insurance packages to your company benefits and more. The goal is to support them as much as you can so they feel comfortable at work and can contribute more.

4. Improve staff knowledge

Enterprises need to pay enough attention to the importance of employee training, as well as soft skills, such as communicative etiquette. This can include real-time learning using video conference calls or a self-directed process using recorded lectures.

It's worth adding that a business may provide opportunities for participants to socialize and cooperate in training groups. Staff may engage in collaborative learning and conduct projects together that may greatly benefit the organization.

5. Check employee performance

Each organization perceives its own definition of performance, but the most common factors that managers measure are the level of absenteeism and the attainment of KPIs. Businesses can improve worker performance by keeping goals clear, matching tasks to people's skills and stimulating them for better results.

6. Use fewer video calls

Many businesses often try to get their online staff together and make it a video conference for every single occasion. At first glance, this seems like a good idea that may connect people and imitate an office space. But when you have too many calls every week, it leads to mental exhaustion, and moreover, people don't have enough time to concentrate on their direct tasks.

Therefore, it’s necessary to balance between video calls, voice calls, chats and emails and make sure workers are not unduly distracted by excessive communication.

7. Organize one-to-one meetings

Every manager should conduct one-to-one online meetings with the members of their teams to make sure everything is on track, both in terms of tasks and employee mental wellbeing. The same refers to the top management, who should conduct one-to-ones with their key players.

The frequency depends on the intensiveness of the work and the processes in a company, but it's better to do such meetings at least once a month.

8. Stimulate social interactions

Companies need to remember that people are inherently social. A system that deprives employees of opportunities to mix among themselves will cause feelings of isolation and negatively affect output. Therefore, managers should encourage human relationships through online joint events, gatherings and informal forums (such as Discord or Slack channels). Also, it's worth it to consider team management software to keep everyone organized and social.

9. Implement the right tools

Of course, online work and employee culture is not only about management, communication and psychology, but also using the necessary tools that will support all of the above. For example, you may use Slack for team chats, Zoom or Google Meet for video calls, Mailbird to keep all emails in one place and manage calendar events and Asana or Trello to track tasks.

It's not enough to just choose and buy the tools; it's necessary to implement them in the proper way. This includes describing processes and delivering training to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Final thoughts

Remote work has given companies the opportunity to benefit from hiring talent from all over the world and cut costs in many terms at the same time, but of course, it has its challenges. Communication and employee culture are among them.

Cultivating healthy relationships among your online employees will pay off in high results and productivity, so it's necessary to approach it as an ongoing business process rather than a set of one-time efforts. Setting office hours, providing your workers with the necessary support, organizing calls in a proper way and stimulating social interactions are among the most necessary steps to follow.