Building a sense of shared purpose, mutual support and accountability, and wild celebration of achievement—those are some of the keys to creating an engaged and productive workplace.
This is challenging enough when you’re all under one roof. Multiply the difficulty by a hundred when your business is spread across several cities in multiple time zones.
It’s easiest to feel connected to the colleagues we see every day—in our department, our shift, or our branch of the company. The challenge for many businesses is connecting people to the colleagues they don’t see every day. So how can a large corporation in several far-flung locations apply the principles of culture transformation that have done wonders for companies with a much smaller footprint?
Fortunately, the first hurdle is cleared before we even begin. Principles are principles. When it comes to building and maintaining a productive and positive workplace culture, what’s good for a one-building firm is good for a five-continent firm. The problem to be solved is mostly logistical. How can you make people all over the world feel the sense of team spirit and unity of purpose that a conference room full of fist-pumping employees feel at an Emmerich Group Kick-Butt Kick-Off® event?
As with so many logistical problems, the fix is made possible in part by modern technology.
The need for a single emotional “kick-off” event that asks each and every employee for a profound commitment to change is exactly the same, no matter what the size of the company. I know of several companies that have broadcast their Kick-Butt Kick-Off to many remote locations in multiple countries in real time. This allowed them to emotionally link several simultaneous gatherings into a single effective event. Others have done kick-offs by division or by individual locations.
The key is to get everyone making an emotional commitment to a single set of rules and principles that will drive the transformation of the culture.
Other practices for culture change can likewise be facilitated by technology. Some organizations do their daily huddle over the phone, with people all over the world dialing in at the same time each and every day. These technologies are now available at very little cost. And even quarterly celebrations can be done by remote, in video form, even including a live microphone in each location to ensure that no one feels like an observer of somebody else’s party.
If your challenge is uniting the many parts in one location, bring departments together as often as possible to touch base and celebrate as a group. A quick daily huddle can be really effective. If your workplace has multiple shifts, huddle at the start of each one. Same with quarterly celebrations.
Have them at different times throughout the day so people on every shift can get the benefit. Spread information from each shift to the whole workplace community by posting photos and notices about winners to see who is exemplifying the values of your organization by making key results and key initiatives happen. Tape a video from the day shift to the swing shift hooping and hollering hello and congratulations! Have winners of an award on graveyard shift send a WOOHOO! to the winner of the same award on days.
Connect people to their workplace communities, then the communities to each other, all built around shared objectives and a single shared vision.
There’s no end to the ways in which the world can be made smaller. The key is to understand the principles of transformation first and foremost, then to solve the very manageable logistics of getting all hands on deck to buy in to those principles no matter how far they are from the home office.