After being thrust into a remote work environment from the pandemic, many enterprises are adopting a hybrid environment for their employees, but it comes with several challenges. Many businesses are struggling to create a positive company culture in a hybrid environment. 

To motivate and support their workforce, leadership needs to build their hybrid culture through communication, clear expectations, and support. We’ll address several ways enterprises can boost performance and efficiency by prioritizing their hybrid culture.

Tips for Building a Positive Hybrid Culture

Here are our best tips for creating a hybrid culture that increases performance and productivity:

Communicating Shared Purpose

To maintain your company culture in a hybrid environment, leadership needs to communicate the company’s shared purpose often through various mediums. By reinforcing the enterprise’s common goals, core values, and purpose, managers can create an energy that will drive performance and strategy.

When employees clearly understand what drives the company, they feel motivated and driven to achieve KPIs that contribute to the company goals and initiatives. It becomes critical for managers to communicate, motivate, and remind their teams how their work connects to the company’s purpose.

Managers can use office promotional items to communicate key messaging, goals, or company values to keep ideals top of mind while providing useful office supplies or technology for their teams.

Need ways to communicate the core values of a company vision? Learn more about 1338Tryon’s promotional items.

Related Link: Creating and Growing Your Brand Vision and Mission 

Instilling Accountability

In a hybrid environment, it can be difficult for managers to balance flexibility and performance. To motivate employees, managers need to set clear expectations for deliverables and then follow through by holding employees accountable for their work. To instill accountability in a hybrid environment, Gallup recommends:

• Defining expectations and deliverables.
• Creating measurable goals for each team member.
• Providing continual feedback and communication from managers.
• Aligning deliverables with an employee’s development to help motivate and improve their skillset—making a win-win for both the company and the individual.
• Recognizing and celebrating individual and team success.

By holding them accountable, leadership creates a high-performance culture, and the employees feel valued for their work. 

Providing a Fair and Inclusive Hybrid Environment

To build a positive company culture, employees need to feel their hybrid environment is fair and inclusive regardless of if they are in the office or working remotely. Working in the office can provide opportunities that remote employees may not be exposed to, and remote employees may have access to better technology than in-office employees. 

To ensure that employees feel they are being given the same opportunities regardless of where they work, managers need to be mindful of these differences and work to over-communicate to their teams to create transparency so that the work environment feels fair and inclusive.

Not sure which outdoor promotional item is right for your company? Contact 1338Tryon for their expertise and customized solutions.

Related Link: The Importance of Tangible Marketing: a 2021 Business Guide

Resolving Conflict Constructively

Every business has miscommunication and conflict, but it is how leadership works to resolve these issues and conflicts that affect the company culture. In a hybrid environment, it becomes increasingly difficult because individuals can avoid dealing with the problem or may escalate the issue because of miscommunication. 

A Stanford organizational behavior professor, Kindred Greer, noted that conflict within virtual teams could negatively affect performance and escalate quickly.

Human resources need to have a clearly defined strategy for handling conflicts and training their leadership on recognizing potential differences, finding commonality, allowing for differences, and resolving issues constructively.

Rewarding Productivity and Efficiency

Allow employees to determine the best strategy for being productive. Give them the flexibility and autonomy to find their groove in a hybrid environment and then openly reward those that perform efficiently and effectively. This will create a culture of high performance and productivity.

Prioritizing Human Interaction and Well-Being

We learned from the pandemic that people need human interaction and that it contributes to our overall well-being. In a hybrid work environment, leadership needs to find ways to build and optimize team social interactions. Some ideas for creating social interaction:

• Designate time at the beginning or end of your meetings for social conversation and interaction.
• Provide opportunities for introverted employees to get individual time with their managers or co-workers.
• Plan virtual coffee breaks to connect and relax.
• Schedule social events and virtual lunches to set work aside and find commonality.

Being Visible and Accessible

A clear theme throughout these tips is the need for clear communication. This is especially important for leadership, which means managers need to strive to be visible and accessible to their teams and peers.

A business leader can cultivate a sense of community by regularly checking in with all their team members to communicate, give feedback, or help resolve any issues. This also means being accessible when the needs of the team arise. Managers should also pair team members for tasks and projects to create visibility within the team too.

Make Your Hybrid Culture a Priority

In a hybrid environment, putting in the effort to cultivate a positive hybrid culture will boost performance and employee satisfaction. When leadership works diligently to communicate, hold accountable, and reward effort, the company will become more efficient and performance-driven.

And when the employees feel their development, performance, and opinion matter to the company, they’ll feel valued and motivated, creating a positive hybrid work environment. 

1338Tryon offers full-service promotional items to help communicate and boost morale and employee satisfaction. With first-class customer service, kitting and fulfillment, and global distribution, 1338Tryon can customize a solution to motivate and improve your hybrid culture. 

Want to learn more about your customization options for employee promotional gifts? Contact 1338Tryon to learn more about our process.

Related Link: Why Does Your Business Need Corporate Apparel