Who Are You? - Company Culture in the New Normal

We’re more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic and, for the first time, we can truly say that we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Vaccinations are underway globally, we now know an awful lot more about the virus and how to treat it, and we’ve developed ways to find some sort of safe social life. Sure, there’s still plenty to go, but I’m optimistic by nature, so it’s hard not to feel hopeful about the coming months.

Following that sentiment, a lot of people are already imagining their return to the offices and everything that comes with it: embracing a hybrid working model, redesigning the floor plans, adopting a new approach to talent, investing in new technologies, and applying the lessons learned during 2020. But I haven’t seen much discussion about something equally important - corporate culture.

I believe that that’s because there’s the general understanding that, even with all the pandemic-related disruptions, the companies are the same at their core. Yes, the processes may have changed, there might be new technologies and tools, and the workforce is mostly remote but many people don’t see all of these things as having an impact on who the companies are and how they conduct business.

While that may hold some truth to it, I firmly believe that it’s impossible that corporate culture hasn’t fundamentally changed. In fact, I think that, as we go back to the offices and leave the pandemic behind, we’ll see more and more of the unforeseen consequences of this health crisis in corporate identities across the board.

Searching for a new dynamic

Imagining that we would be back in the office and everything was going to be the same was fine and understandable during the first uncertain months of the pandemic. But after a year of being locked away in their homes and working remotely, it’s to be expected that people “forget” about the office dynamic. The chance encounters by the watercooler, the casual Fridays, the informal conversations during lunch - all of that was replaced by joke backgrounds over Zoom and passing remarks on an email or over Slack.

The in-office experience is impossible to replicate with video calls and gifs, so it’s not crazy to think that the relationships between your team are going to be impacted. And since the team is crucial for corporate culture (in a sense, it’s its living embodiment), it’s only natural that it’s affected as well. Think, for instance, about the people that have joined a new company and have never been able to share the office spaces with their colleagues - how can they embrace the corporate culture in the same way as the people that worked together in the office for years?

New people aren’t the only ones that will redefine your business dynamic once you head back to the office. Those that have been around for years in your company will also bring new expectations and concerns. For one, they might not be willing to go back to the office full time, so they might expect a new working arrangement that considers partial remote work. On the other hand, some may have a tough time readjusting to the office, maybe even showing some safety concerns you’ll have to address.

Both of those are just a couple of examples of something larger that will directly affect your business dynamic and, consequently, who you are as a business. If your team is affected, then your corporate culture will be necessarily different. And that’s without considering the significant impact on your culture of the many disruptions your business has surely suffered.

Seeing the opportunity behind the crisis

Faced with so many challenges in a post-pandemic world, you may be tempted to neglect the impact on your corporate culture. After all, you have a lot of important aspects to focus on, including business continuity and sustainable recovery on the path to renewed growth. Following that line of thinking, you may leave corporate culture to evolve on its own, which is certainly an alternative, albeit not the optimal one.

While it’s true that you surely have to deal with multiple things, letting your company’s culture on its own can create a leadership vacuum. Left to their own devices, your employees will surely develop a new work culture that tweaks the old culture where needed. Unfortunately, you can’t expect that the resulting culture aligns with your vision and values.

If you decide to prevent that from happening, you have 2 options: either you go back to your “traditional” culture or evolve it into a new one. Going back appears as the easy option for anyone that doesn’t want to spend too much time thinking about corporate culture. But I don’t think it’s the best way to go, as your traditional culture might (and most likely has) grow outdated, be it partially or totally.

For example, if your company has always been an on-site type of business and you are now pushing for everyone to go back to that mindset, you’ll probably clash with the expectations of the next-gen workforce that sees remote work as a new standard. If you fail to update that part of your culture, you’ll have to deal with extra challenges.

That leaves us with the third alternative - modernizing your corporate culture to fit the new landscape. That also constitutes a challenge, as you have to add a new layer to the shifts you’ll have to make. But if you put yourself in the right mindset and have the proper attitude, you can find an answer to who you are in the new normal. Some of the things you can do that can help include:

• Consider the operational changes you’ve already made and their impact on your culture. This can include the impact of adopting new technology, digitizing entire processes, adding new members from remote locations, and your own stance regarding the pandemic-forced changes. How much did these things force you to veer away from your traditional corporate culture? What did you have to give up to make room for them?
• Realign people with new priorities. The pandemic surely forced you to reprioritize tasks and redistribute resources across your company. Doing so can have had an impact on your team, especially a negative one on the people that “lost” resources or whose work is now non-priority. You’ll have to align them to the new way of doing things, explaining the changes, training them to help in their new roles, or even creating new spaces for their skills. 
• Support and reaffirm your values but also embrace the ones brought by your team. It’s likely that your values (the very core of your corporate culture) remained the same during the crisis. But maybe the way in which you express or act on them has changed. You have to find the balance between reaffirming them in the new scenario and updating them to meet your team’s new expectations around them. 

A look in the mirror

I think that the most important take in here is that it’s impossible for your company to be the same when everything around you has changed. Like it or not, the pandemic has forever changed how we see work and how we carry it out. It also impacted people in countless ways, from their expectations to their priorities. If you fail to understand that or believe that you can get away with doing the things that you did before COVID-19, you’re in for a surprise.

Thus, making the necessary adjustments to your corporate culture appears as a must-do when moving forward. Where that will take you will naturally depend on what’s your starting point. At BairesDev, we are a remote company from day one, so we were operationally prepared to face the pandemic challenges. In fact, our culture is widely diverse and highly digital, mainly because we work with distributed teams. Yet, even with all that, we had to work on evolving processes during the pandemic to make our teams feel accompanied and supported.

What I’m trying to say is that no company can escape from the effects of the pandemic on corporate culture, an impact that we’ll surely keep feeling for some time and to which we’ll have to constantly adapt. In other words, I think that path forward isn’t “going back” but rather evolving who we are to become a better version of ourselves. That shift can feel like a titanic task but you can do it more easily by looking yourself in the mirror and identifying the core values that have always propelled you.

Once you do that, you can use them to guide the changes you’ll champion in your culture. Through that common thread, you’ll be sure that you don’t lose your essence but you’ll push yourself to reimagine your company to meet the new normal with its expectations and challenges.