Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
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When you think about managing remote workers, what’s your priority?
Ensuring they have the right productivity tips to meet quotas from afar? Scheduling video calls that work for everyone’s schedule? Or perhaps sparking creativity while they work from home?
These are all important, but don’t let building and maintaining a great team culture get lost in the mix.
As the world stabilizes the remote work norm, work culture will become more globalized. Your team today might have a few people from other countries and cultures, but tomorrow, the working environment will accelerate that trend exponentially. And as you build a high-performing team with max diversity, you’ll also be building a remote work culture for your organization.
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
Darren Menabney is lead of global employee engagement at Ricoh Co. Ltd., as well as a lecturer at GLOBIS University. In his online course, Fostering a Strong Remote Team Culture, he talks about what culture means for us individuals and what workplace culture will mean for remote employees of the future.
Below is a transcribed excerpt of his course.
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Culture has a huge impact on any team, particularly on remote teams.
Darren Menabney
Transcript:
Why Remote Work Culture Matters
Darren Menabney: This topic of working remotely, of learning remotely, of communicating remotely is really one I have a strong passion for and commitment to. It’s something I see and do every day. So I think it’s vital for all of us to get better at becoming more effective members of remote teams and leaders of remote teams.
To become a more effective leader of a remote team, you really have to consider things like, “How does technology affect my team? How does my leadership affect my team? And how does culture affect my team?”
Culture is a tricky one. It’s a bit fuzzy. It’s the one we maybe don’t think about enough, but culture has a huge impact on any team, particularly on remote teams.
There’s a famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker, which is “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
So, no matter how good your strategy is, no matter how good your plans are, if you don’t recognize and account for culture, you’re not going to succeed. So culture is a vital part of any team, but with different considerations for any remote or virtual team.
Team Culture, Collaboration, and Communication
Menabney: A successful remote team, like any team, is one that is able to achieve its objectives by collaborating and communicating.
Collaboration and communication are things we kind of think we know how to do instinctively. But we also have to think about how culture influences this.
So to be an effective remote team when culture comes into play, how does a company culture, or a team culture, or a national culture affect how we communicate?
Not everyone communicates in the same way. Everyone has different cultural assumptions or norms. Those have a big impact on a remote team, and particularly a virtual team, a global team, where you do have different national cultures—different ways of thinking, of communicating, of collaborating coming into play.
So again, a successful remote team is one which understands how that dimension of culture impacts the functioning of a remote team and is able to account for culture, leverage its strengths, and overcome challenges associated with cultural difference as members of virtual teams.
We don’t think about the culture we move through because it surrounds us all the time.
Darren Menabney
What Culture Means for Remote Companies
Menabney: We often think of culture as something that’s very nebulous, or a fuzzy concept. But I think we all have a sense of what our own culture is. So I like to define culture as “the way we do things around here.” How we think, how we act around here.
Now “here” could be your team, it could be your company, or it could be a country. All of those have different aspects of culture that influence the way we think and act and behave.
The thing about culture is that we often don’t recognize it because it’s around us all the time. We don’t intentionally think how we’re acting based on our culture. I’ve heard it described as “Fish don’t realize they’re swimming through water because it’s around them all the time.”
We don’t think about the culture we move through because it surrounds us all the time.
But when we are working with cultural differences, especially national cultures, then our “water” is different. And the way we behave and interact and collaborate with different members of our team—or customers or clients, but particularly team members—we have to really consider how culture impacts that. Both our culture and the culture of our counterparts.
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