WHAT HAPPENS TO CULTURE WHEN WORK GOES VIRTUAL?

How to cultivate a healthy culture has long been a question that has occupied conversations from HR to interior design. We have been wanting more work/life balance by having time off and we have been wanting more human-focused work-environments that lower how stressed we feel at work. We have been getting more health benefits, better snacks and more work-from-home flex-days to combat the impact of long work hours and hectic cultures. The old culture, where performance is driven by constant engagement without breaks through-out the day and the constant push to keep up with the speed of technology is being challenged in the face of COVID, where our health has become more important than ever.

The pre-COVID culture conversation was about how we could create better work-environments that would increase performance, engagement and productivity, without just pushing harder and living on the edge of burnout. We thought of a health and wellbeing culture as gym memberships, counting steps and popular diets. We designed group activities and interiors that would create a work-environment, where humans could feel more human by engaging with each other in hubs that didn’t look like work-stations, and we would have more perks to help us keep going without losing motivation and burning out. 

SO WILL THERE STILL BE CULTURE WHEN WE WORK FROM HOME? 

Culture is there no matter what, the question is what’s the quality of the culture? Culture is about how we feel at work, it’s about human relationships and it’s about belonging, so culture will still be there when we work from home, the question becomes how do we nurture it? Rethinking culture post-COVID is probably more seeing culture for what it always was supposed to be. Culture is about care. 

Now care can mean many things for each of us, but let’s start with acknowledging the fact that it took something like COVID to make us slow down for long enough to ask the question; what do we want from work? What do we care about and how do we nourish that on a daily basis? 

I think we have are at a crucial point here where we have the opportunity to rethink culture because the burnout culture wasn’t working as it was. However we might be headed towards another version of it, if we don’t change the way we work, because working virtually might just be the next burnout. 

How do we create the kind of connectedness and belonging that is so central to culture? 

THE BURNOUT CULTURE OF THE NOT-ENOUGH MINDSET

One of the core reasons for burnout is that we feel we are working without meaning. We get overwhelmed when we have too much to do and not enough to support to get it done. We get overwhelmed when we have too many worries and not enough insight into how to move forward. We get frustrated when we consistently feel stuck in overdrive without relief, and we burn out when we feel that we are going nowhere without enough progress, when we feel our efforts are not recognized and our contribution not acknowledged. Emotional burnout happens when we feel that we are not enough and that we don’t matter. When we feel unappreciated, confused about the direction of our work and doubting our worth, which in a virtual work-culture can happen really fast, because we work alone and the human connection of belonging can fall through the cracks in the new virtual reality we are all in. 

SO WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF CULTURE?

Working from home can have its advantages because we don’t feel the constant pressure of the office stress vibe, however its also harder to gauge, if we are appreciated and recognized for our hard work, because we don’t have the face to face or the peer support around us to get the feed-back loop or feel that we are not going it alone. 

Belonging is a major factor in culture, and even though belonging is more about not feeling that we have to hide who we are, it is also about feeling the peer-to-peer collaboration that happens in the kitchen. Working from home we miss out on the water-cooler check in or the smile when passing each other in the hallway. And yet a virtual culture is still culture. The question becomes how much attention and time do we we put into nurturing our relationships? 

We also interact differently when we are virtual than the face to face meetings, where we get the sense of body-language and energy by simply sharing the space. It can be more intimidating and uncomfortable not to have the normal human-to-human clues, that helps us sense into how well a meeting is going for example. 

The new culture is about communication. 

WE CAN ALWAYS CARE

A healthy culture is built on better communication and better communication comes from care. It takes two major changes. We have to learn the tools of emotional self-care and we have to learn the language, that cultivates a culture of care. 

The self-care mindset is an essential tool for cultivating emotional health and wellbeing and a culture built on collective care, where people belong and work better, even virtually, and it starts with creating a culture of pausing, where we notice, ask and listen so that we can think, engage and lead with care.