Tag Archives: remote teams

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: Company Culture

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In order to create and maintain great company culture, employers are focused on ensuring their staff is motivated, team-oriented, and happy to stay with the company for the long haul. A mere six months ago, this meant company culture was all about happy hours, off-site team outings, and in-office communication and rapport. Essentially, creating ways for employees to interact with one another in positive ways, both within and outside of a work context. Cut to today: employees are no longer in shared spaces, teams can’t gather for meetings or activities, and all communication occurs virtually. Read on as we discuss how to maintain company culture when the workplace landscape has transformed so drastically.

The Danger

Zoom meeting fatigue. Lowered productivity. Ineffective communication. Unmotivated team members. These are all the dangers that occur when teams go remote. Underlying all these symptoms is the larger problem: company culture may be at risk of dying. As teams around the world are planning to stay remote for the foreseeable future, the question on everyone’s mind is: how can you maintain company culture in a remote environment? 

How to Avoid

Everything we’ve mentioned so far may sound dire, but we promise there are ways to adapt your company culture so it can thrive even in a remote environment. Some of these tweaks may not alter things overnight, we all have to work together to gradually adapt to our changing world. However, our aim is to help you develop a mindset so you can find creative solutions to kickstart your company culture in these uncertain times.

Our first suggestion is to have meetings with meaning. It makes sense why many people find giant, 20+ person Zoom meetings exhausting—it’s hard to focus, they have to constantly fight to be heard, and technical errors can make meetings run long. Our solution is to get creative, perhaps you can break your team into smaller pods. Then you can keep larger team meetings succinct and smaller pods can break out into separate meetings in which they can feel seen and heard and be given clear instructions. This way, employees can feel more comfortable asking questions and continue building rapport. 

Second, never underestimate the power of employee feedback. We know employers are doing everything in their power to maintain culture but blindspots occur despite the best intentions. It may be scary but don’t hesitate to ask your employees about what’s working and what’s not. Their honest feedback can illuminate seemingly small issues, which you can address before they become problematic.

Opportunity

Just because you’re not in the office anymore, doesn’t mean the old office shenanigans can’t still be in play. Some of the goofy and fun things you used to do can be translated into a virtual environment. For example, if you used to buy the employee of the month lunch, send them a meal via a delivery service like GrubHub or Postmates. If managers used to grab coffee with their team members, give them a monthly coffee stipend from Starbucks that they can use to send drinks to their team. When we’re all apart, small acts of care can go a long way. Also, keep having fun! During team meetings, play a game like “Two Truths and a Lie” so you can continue getting to know each other and not have every interaction be solely about work. 

Tip

Have fun with it and be easy on yourself. We all have enough going on, especially right now.  Bring some good positive energy to the group and take care of your employees. In turn, you’ll continue to have a motivated, hard-working team that enjoys working with one another. 

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See how CorpStrat can help you transform your Company Culture. Contact us at marketing@www.corpstrat.com.

Employee Benefits Package Webinar recap

Effective Ways to Manage Employees in a Remote Environment: The Benefit Package

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Employee Benefits Package Webinar recap

It’s hard to believe that just a few short months ago, our country’s unemployment rate was at an all time low. Pre-pandemic, keeping employees happy often involved pricey company perks like free gourmet lunches, massages, and elite gym memberships. Now because of COVID-19, our entire world has changed: unemployment is soaring and non-essential teams have gone remote (and may remain remote). The entire US workforce and workplace has dramatically changed, which means what we offer our employees in terms of benefits has to undergo a dramatic change as well. Today we’ll go over creative solutions to help shift your benefits package to suit the new economic environment. 

The Danger

For employers, it’s absolutely vital to alter your current benefits package in order to adapt to the current economic climate. Choosing not to do so could leave your company in the dust. In the coming months, as companies begin cautiously opening up offices and rehiring, they’ll face the challenge of potential employees viewing these slimmed down benefit packages as weak. It’s important to strike the right balance of not overspending in this new normal, while maintaining an attractive benefits package. We’ve also found that many employers cut spending in the wrong places because they aren’t aware of important tax opportunities and fail to take advantage of them. 

How to Avoid

A lot of employers have been spending over 80% of the employees’ health insurance premiums on expensive plans. You can still offer full health coverage but switching down to silver plans in lieu of gold can cut costs by as much as 20%. Health insurance is a big line item on most employer’s profit and losses statements. It’s typically in the top three, right behind rent and salaries. Being able to change employer contributions and trim 20% out of employer costs is a huge opportunity right now. 

At the same time inexpensive benefit plans can be added with minimal to no cost. Employees value plans like dental, vision, life insurance, and employer sponsored disability insurance. Plans that feature these can help employers round out their offerings without being a high cost item.

At the end of the day, don’t sell your benefits package short. Sometimes offering an appealing benefits package is all about how it’s presented. Creating a benefits brochure that points out both the obvious and hidden benefits offered can help current and potential employees understand the full scope of their benefits package. 

There is also another great tool called a hidden paycheck. What a hidden paycheck statement does is give the employee an overview of all the money that the employer is spending on them—like taxes, health insurance, retirement plans, and other fringe benefits. For example, if an employee makes $60,000 a year, there’s a good probability they are only pocketing $3,500 a month. On this employee’s hidden paycheck statement, they would see everything the employer is spending on them, often totaling up to as much as $80,000 a year. Employees can then gain a greater sense of their value to the company rather than looking at their $3,500 take home pay.

Opportunity

The opportunity here is to modify plans and contributions based on the current economic environment. Get creative in building your benefit package, use voluntary plans, use ancillary plans, and lastly, shift employee perks  to support work from home needs.

You’ll find that many of the traditional perks like company lunches, free snacks in the office, or commuter stipends, are no longer useful, and won’t be viewed favorably. Shifting perks to include things like virtual fitness memberships, mental health and telemedicine, wellness checks, childcare options, are what employees will value going forward. 

Finally and maybe most importantly is adding a work from home policy in your benefits package. Many teams have gone remote without a noticeable drop in productivity. This means employees both know it’s possible to work efficiently from home and want to continue working from home. Including a work from home policy in the benefit package is going to be vital for most employers going forward to continue to attract top talent.

Tip

As we mentioned at the beginning, this is not a one size fits all. There’s no cookie cutter or plug and play approach, every industry and every situation is going to be unique. It’s important for employers to work with someone who can bring fresh ideas, understand the market, understand the industry and can bring real solutions.

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See how CorpStrat can help you transform your Employee Benefits Package. Contact us at marketing@www.corpstrat.com.