How to Build a Thriving Virtual Culture
With the workforce taking on the challenge of transiting to virtual operations, new company cultures emerge. To ensure that high service standards, morale, and engagement, you have to have a clear culture in place. Most importantly though, you need buy-in from your team. You can start by asking yourself and your team "What makes a great company culture?" And when issues come up "How could we change our culture to become the solution to this issue?"Remember to take it slow, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is a thriving virtual culture.
1. Re-work your vision, purpose, and mission.
You need to first go back to the very beginning and pivot your branding now that your company is virtual. You can re-define your vision, mission, and purpose with the new values you wish to embrace. For our team its being servant leaders, being a good neighbor, being a student of your craft, acting respectfully, having an executive mindset, and building meaningful relationships. So figure out what's most important for you and how you can re-work your branding strategy to reflect that.
2. Bring in new communication channels.
Streamlining communication will be more important now. Here at Worxbee, we use Zoom for meetings, ClickUp for project management, and Slack for building community. Another key to our success are core hours, the active hours everyone is available to one another. Everyone is available 10am-3pm EST, this is when all calls and meetings take place. Other than that, our work time is flexible.
3. Embrace diversity and inclusion.
Everyone has something valuable to bring to the table and diversity sparks innovation! It's time to level-up your diversity and inclusion strategy. You can first start by looking at your own team and who you are bringing on. Is it reflective of the world we live in? If not take steps to change that. If you already have a diverse team, think of ways to push meaningful change in regards to race and gender discrimination. At Worxbee, we are putting together a mentoring program to help guide minorities who desire to excel in a career as an Executive Assistant and give them direction and guidance from an experienced EA.
4. Update your content.
Once you establish new core values, post them throughout your website, write blogs on what's important to your culture. Posting about your core values, mission, purpose, and vision will attract the right people to your website and ultimately, your business.
5. Schedule re-occuring meetings.
Every week we have set meeting times. This creates consistency with our team communication. We start the week with a meeting and wrap up the week with a meeting. One way our team brings culture to the forefront is by doing a weekly core value focus. Each week team members are challenged to share a way that they are living out the core values!
6. Build meaningful relationships.
Social interaction with your peers is still a much needed aspect of everyday life! The less isolated your team members feel, the happier and more engaged your team will be. Building meaningful relationship is important to any type of team. From a culture perspective, it's probably the most important step for building a thriving culture. So remember to be delightfully professional, encourage one another, share feedback, share joys and hardships, and inspire one another.
If you or a peer would like to discuss strategy for building a thriving virtual culture with a Virtual Executive Assistant please schedule a complimentary consultation with Worxbee today!
