Missing the water-cooler skinder? Help is at hand
With SA’s mandatory lockdown in full swing, Monday meetups, Friday post-work get-togethers and banter at the water cooler have become distant memories as companies with sizeable remote workforces hit their keyboards from home.
Workplace experts have warned that the gravest threat from remote work is that it could break social bonds, but they are hopeful technology can be used to ensure office culture is maintained, albeit virtually.
Bryan Hattingh, founder of Johannesburg-based exponential leadership firm Cycan, believes “the immediate concern despite the ostensible freedoms of remote working is that employees could quickly feel excluded from the company’s culture”.
“Remote teams have been a reality before reality hit home on the back of a public health crisis.
“But for many employees, doing this en masse and suddenly is a stressful experiment.”
He believes a good opportunity to create culture over distance is to leverage shared interests and group people together.
“There are a number of offthe-shelf digital coaching programmes that enable employees to deliver their best working remotely.
“Workplace collaboration technology is quite advanced and, implemented well, will make employees feel as if they are participating at work and connected.
“The lockdown is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for leaders to engage leadership archetypes which are predominantly transformational and collaborative, rather than command and control.
“This will enable them to continue galvanising their teams and inculcating self-determination and accountability within each of the members,” he said.
“While it is true that the social bonds that occur naturally in an office environment stand to be compromised when working remotely, it is also true that humans are social beings and bonds don’t easily diminish because of distance.”
According to Hattingh, technology has leapfrogged to such an extent that you can have “social sundowners” with friends across time zones without leaving your home.
“As a willing participant in the remote working experiment, you have invariably reached out to friends you haven’t met in years, reconnected with old acquaintances that you had put off because of lack of time.
“The more things change the more they stay the same, so even with technology evolving rapidly, it will only contribute to making social bonds even stronger.
“In this chaos and crisis, people are already putting that much more effort into maintaining relationships and bonds.
“Of course, there are limitations — with having drinks over Zoom you won’t be able to hug, but right now in the era of social distancing, you can’t do that anyway,” Hattingh said.
Luca Gallarelli, head of TBWA SA, an advertising and creative collective, said as much as the Covid-19 pandemic tested human resilience, it also tested the values companies claimed to hold dear.
“If the company is emotionally and socially invested in the employees and clients, retaining and managing company culture, and employee and client experience, becomes a clear priority, even in dizzying and daunting times.
“Our people and their safety is core to our workplace culture and we made it mandatory to work remotely long before the national lockdown.”
The “social” aspect was incorporated using Microsoft Teams which serves as the boardroom and space for “water-cooler” conversations.—