Redefining remote organizational cultures

Introduction

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, individuals working remotely has changed the methods in which information are being created and shared within organizations. Specifically, the new norm of complete online work yielded cultural challenges for managers to consider new ways of addressing the gaps that were primarily dependent on in-person meetings and activities. Is remote work here to stay even after the pandemic? If so, how can managers and supervisors better assist the organizations and their employees? This essay explores the current circumstances of online cultures, its subsequent problems, and highlighting solutions for managers to better support their employees moving forward.

Organizational culture: Main concepts and principles

According to Schein, culture is “a pattern of shared basic assumptions, invented, discovered, or developed by a given group, as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore, is to be taught to new members of the group as the correct way to perceive it, think, and feel in relation to those problems" (Schein, 1991).

When individuals are looking for a prospective workplace, organization culture is a great differentiator that people consider. Glassdoor’s Mission & Culture Survey 2019 found that over 77% of adults across four countries (U.S., U.K., France, and Germany) would consider a company’s culture before applying for a job there, and 79% would consider a company’s mission and purpose before applying. Culture suggests what to do and what not to do regarding knowledge processing and communication in organizations. (Davenport, 1997) 

But what methodologies are used to define an organizational culture? According to Choo, organization culture can be cultivated through optimizing knowledge  creation and sharing: Knowledge creation being achieved through managing the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge, and through designing social processes that generate new knowledge by converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. (Choo , 8) Tacit knowledge consists of subjective know-how, insights, and intuitions that comes to a person after having worked on an activity for a long period of time. On the other hand, explicit knowledge is formal knowledge that is easier to transmit between individuals and groups which may be coded in the form of formulas, instructions, procedures, and rules. (Choo, 8) Organizational culture is increasingly being recognized as a major barrier to effective knowledge creation, sharing, and use (De Long & Fahey, 2000). Can both tacit and explicit knowledge be optimized through online technologies in remote work?

Remote organizational culture in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic

The Gartner survey (2020) found that 82% plan to move their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions in the third phase. According to Wrycza and Maslankowski’s sentiment analysis on social media users, the topic of remote work at epidemic peak in March 2020 increased almost 15 times during a year. The sentiment analysis confirmed the approval of remote work by over 60% of its users. To support this increasing trend, online collaboration is supplemented with software systems that lets team members transfer information using video, audio and text. Most widely used remote meeting environments include Zoom, Cisco WebEx, and Slack. Furthermore, Twitter users in general, had a positive opinion of remote work, up to 62.2% in April 2020, in the course of the widespread implementation and real use of the remote work tools (Wrycza and Maslankowski, 7). 

There are benefits to remote work for organizations, which includes accessing a wider pool of applicants, minimized cost for office space, and improved employee retention (Hunkeler). Furthermore, organizations must be mindful of how the culture is being cultivated for higher rate of employee retention. Benefits to employees include savings on commuting, optimized working time, and avoiding conflicts with colleagues. 

Problems in remote organizational cultures

Lack of employee visibility

It is more difficult for managers to keep track of every single employee and their activities to measure their performance completely online. Furthermore, in the essence of online conflicts, Armstrong and Cole (2002) reported that conflicts in geographically distributed teams went unidentified and unaddressed longer than conflicts in collocated teams. (Hinds & Bailey, 615) Another challenge comes from the technical limitations from the widely used online tools: There’s always room for miscommunication due to technical disruption in the networks. Poor wifi signals can impact an individual’s motivation to continue collaborating online. Furthermore, poor user experience around booking and managing meetings, sharing information and artifacts, and configuring multiple hardware tools (microphones, camera and external screens) also affect work efficiency.

Lack of personal communication

The pandemic has significantly isolated individuals to themselves or to their immediate families. As Choo mentions, tacit knowledge consists of subjective know-how, insights, and intuitions that comes to a person after having worked on an activity for a long period of time (Choo, 8), which includes the act of socialization. It is necessary to build a social network to gain trust when working collaboratively with colleagues. Furthermore, it is said that friendship is easier to establish when people casually encounter one another and interact spontaneously. (Hinds & Bailey, 618). Is small talk and personal conversation appropriate online with their colleagues? What is the right balance between sharing personal details or strictly sharing work information?

Although social interactions can be achieved online, there are gaps when it comes to sharing emotional interactions. It is explained that in situations in which knowledge is valued highly, individuals may tend to claim emotional ownership of knowledge (Jones & Jordan, 1997). This sense of ownership comes from the fact that in several settings, linked to status, career prospects, and individual reputations (Andrews & Delahaye, 2000).

Solutions 

Trust your employees and demonstrate flexibility

Managers and supervisors in organizations should focus more on the outcomes and not the hours that employees appear online. Flexibility in hours is also important since employees could be dealing with external variables including health and family (children) circumstances where traditional 9-5PM work hours don’t necessarily apply. In order to trust people, it is necessary to get to know them first. Hosting 1:1 meetings and committing some time to chat excluding work topics will help mend the gaps that everyone is experiencing from lack of in-person social networking. 

Praise great work, and offer constructive feedback

With an unstable job market due to the pandemic, employees are feeling nervous about their job and their performance to avoid potential layoffs. A lot are feeling burnt out, and are looking for ways to stay motivated to do good work. (Wrycza and Maslankowski, 9) In order to supplement this experience, managers and supervisors should augment the praises and the tone of the feedback to reinforce positivity and hope.  

Types of organizations that have used it

Companies like Microsoft and Netflix are offering new work from home policies that will allow their employees to work remotely indefinitely. Microsoft now abides by  the rule of “Offer as much flexibility as possible” to make their employees happier. To Microsoft’s justification, you provide them with the environment that allows those individuals to become the best version of themselves. (Bariso)

Tools and methods to support remote culture cultivation

Motivate employees

Working in isolation with no social camaraderie needs to be addressed to motivate the employees. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, by identifying an employee’s current position in the hierarchy, the manager has an indication of what motivator would be most effective when guiding, counseling, and advising the employee to achieve better performance. (Moran, Stueart, Morner, 307)

Collaborate seamlessly real-time with 5G

With the introduction of 5G as our next generation of internet speed, it will revolutionize how people interact online and with services and devices including Internet of Things (IoT). The networks are expected to supercharge IoT, providing the infrastructure needed to carry huge amounts of data that allows for a smarter and more connected world. (McCaann) This upgrade will supplement faster download and upload speeds, smoother streaming of online content, higher quality voice and video calls, reliable connections, connected IoTs, and expansion of self driving cars and smarter cities. We will see a greater culture shift to remain more connected online, and slow network connections yielding poor meeting experiences will soon be forgotten in near future.

Augment the meeting experiences through 3D sensing cameras and virtual environments

Once data transfer becomes faster with 5G, many more mediums of technology will be enabled to support various systems and solutions. 3D sensing cameras are used to capture images to render realistically online and virtually. This method captures images using many different sensors to ultimately extract depth information. (Technoweekly). Imagine 3D camera becoming the norm to capture the user at their own will. This data can then be transferred instantaneously using 5G network to any online destination using virtual environments to augment the meeting experiences. Not only will this create a sense of realism to its participants, but to ultimately break the physical barriers of communication.

Strengths and limitations of the tools and methods

Improving the soft skills to better support employees is a positive reinforcement to further create a positive work environments for everyone in the organization. Enhancing these soft skills with the latest technology such as 5G and virtual environments will enable experiences that are close to face to face interactions. To consider a negative impact, we will see less and less human experiences that take place in person. Should our human experiences be negotiated at the expense of our health?  

Conclusion and future work

Culture is an ambiguous set of basic assumptions, values, and orientations to an individual and an organization’s work processes. The cultural landscape is changing with the presence of the pandemic which is yielding greater opportunities for managers to better care for their employees while meeting the business goals. New technologies will allow individuals to collaborate more freely online without physical barriers being a blocker. Through these new mediums, members will be enabled to share their cultural knowledge through dialogue and discourse, and articulate what they intuitively know with the help of analogies, metaphors, and stories. (Choo, 4)

References

Academic sources

Moran, Stueart, Morner. Chapter 14 (Leadership). In Library and Information Center Management, 8th ed., Libraries Unlimited, 2012. 

Schein, E. (1991). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. (Schein 1991, p. 247) 

Stanisław Wrycza & Jacek Maślankowski (2020) Social Media Users’ Opinions on Remote Work during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Thematic and Sentiment Analysis, Information Systems Management, 37:4, 288-297, https://doi.org 10.1080/10580530.2020.1820631 

Hinds, P.J., & Bailey, D.E. (2004). Out of Sight, Out of Sync: Understanding Conflict in Distributed Teams. Organization Science, 14 no. 6: 615-632 

Choo, C. (2005). The Knowing Organization: How Organizations Use Information to Construct Meaning, Create Knowledge, and Make Decisions

Andrews, K. Delahaye, B. (2000). Influences On Knowledge processes In Organizational Learning: The Psychosocial Filter, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00204 

Davenport, Thomas H., and Lawrence Prusak. 1998. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 

Hunkeler, I. "8 BENEFITS OF ALLOWING EMPLOYEES TO WORK REMOTELY”, https://www.zippia.com/employer/8-benefits-allowing-employees-work-remotely/

De Long, D. W., & Fahey, L. (2000). Diagnosing cultural barriers to knowledge management. Academy of Management Executive, 14(4), 113–127.

Jordan, J., & Jones, P. (1997). Assessing your company’s knowledge management style. Long Range Planning, 30(3), 392–398.

Online sources

Gartner. (2020). Gartner survey reveals 82% of company lea- ders plan to allow employees to work remotely some of the time. Retrieved August 26, 2020, from https://www.gartner. com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-07-14-gartner- survey-reveals-82-percent-of-company-leaders-plan-to- allow-employees-to-work-remotely-some-of-the-time 

Glassdoor Team. (2019). "New Survey: Company Mission & Culture Matter More Than Salary”, https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/blog/mission-culture-survey/

McCaann, J. Moore, M. Lumb, D. “5G: Everything you need to know”, https://www.techradar.com/news/what-is-5g-everything-you-need-to-know

Bariso, J. “This Company's New 2-Sentence Remote Work Policy Is the Best I've Ever Heard”, https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-companys-new-2-sentence-remote-work-policy-is-best-ive-ever-heard.html

Technoweekly. (2020). “Professional 3D Camera Market Forecast to 2028: How it is Going to Impact on Global Industry to Grow in Near Future”, https://technoweekly.com/technologies/758938/professional-3d-camera-market-forecast-to-2028-how-it-is-going-to-impact-on-global-industry-to-grow-in-near-future/