5 Values to Anchor Your Company Around in the Face of Uncertainty
In order to effectively create culture within your company, you must align your team around a set of value. Living those values out on a day to day basis and reinforcing the culture across your thoughts, behaviors, and how you talk about the company internally and externally. As a leader, you carry the culture on your shoulders and whether you like it or not, you role model that culture for everyone around you. After speaking with our network of managers, executives, and founders, we have determined five values that we believe you should build into your culture right now.
1. Focus on the human quality of each individual – what’s going on in their personal lives and what makes them happy: family, passions, sports, literature, TV shows, and movies. Provide your team with the community they have lost and allow for there to be an openness in the way you conduct yourselves. Being human in the distributed environment, along with incentivizing curiosity, makes for remarkable increases in workplace productivity.
2. Lead with compassion. Allow your team to socialize before you get down to business and provide them with the engagement that they may have lost in isolation – let them feel a real sense of belonging and connection to one another. Each individual will understand that they are a vital part of a greater cause, and dive into their work with increased energy.
3. Reset acceptable behaviors for your team. Everyone is all over the spectrum on stress from the pandemic; loosen up the culture and focus on relationships instead. Take a Zoom call from your kitchen, be real, do not pretend that you are not working from home.
4. Share yourself with your team, by explaining to those around you what is going on internally and being open and vulnerable with them, you will create the sense of belonging that they desire at this time. As Nick Venutrino–founder of Odyssey–said, it’s about making sure you're talking to people and sharing what’s going on with you. That sense of belonging is created just by being vulnerable and showing up for the people around you.
5. Re-create the balance between work and home life because currently, it is non-existent. On top of lacking the interpersonal relations of office life, your team experiences no divide between work and home, forcing them towards burnout. You need to artificially create this divide between work and home and establish a work ritual where your team maintains a shared rhythm – where each member has plenty of solo time to hone in and focus on individual projects that they present to the team at the end of the day. And where everyone also ends their work around the same time instead of working late into the night, long after their normal workday would have ended.
If you’re interested in developing your leadership style in these uncertain times, you might be interested in talking to us about some of our remote offerings.
At OverTime Leader we provide executive leadership and management advisory for technology-enabled businesses and teams. If you are looking to spark a people-powered change in your business our team has a toolbox full of ways to help you get started.
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