How We Maintain The Company Culture At Our Agency Despite Being Remote

Adapting to the new dynamic of the COVID workplace, agency owners are now engaged in a new struggle to create a better environment for their workers — it isn't easy with the chaotic and demanding workload

Keeping the company culture alive is probably one of the biggest challenges when leading a remote team in a growing agency. Video calls can never fully replace the casual banter about the company and the team when you bump into your co-worker in the office kitchen. However, our agency, NOVOS, has adapted quite well to the new reality and we have been able to remotely onboard 5 new team members successfully - one of them lives in Poland!

Here's some advice for other agency owners based on our experience:

Engagement

The lack of regular face to face contact does hamper the feeling of being and working together, so we have come up with various ways to keep our team engaged. With a slight easing of restrictions, we have moved to a mixed model of working that combines at-home and in-office work. We had signed a new lease at WeWork for office, but instead, due to COVID we decided to back out of the agreement, give up our deposit and arrange a model where employees can work from home most of the time but are allocated each a monthly budget to spend on booking workspace at WeWork. They've been given WeMemberships — they can purchase more credits, and arrange with others in the teams to go in/meet on the same day.

This has worked very well so far, with many enjoying seeing everyone again.

During the total lockdown, we organized creative events and quizzes on the team slack channel. When we organized a ‘Guess Whose Flat is This’ and ‘Guess the Baby’, we got a 100% participation from our team with fun comments flying in every minute — it felt as if we were laughing together. Tom, one of our recent hires to be remotely onboarded, has also shown us how to play virtual beer pong!

Creative virtual events help the team members know each other on a more personal level.

Transparency and ownership

Sharing regular business updates can help make the staff feel more responsible for the growth of the agency. It is as important to share the challenges that the agency is facing as it is to celebrate a new client win. In the face of sudden layoffs around the world, it is natural for your team to feel anxious — keeping the team updated with the health of the business can help remove the uncertainty.

We, at NOVOS, share our monthly revenue, annual projections and profits with the entire company during our monthly meeting as we wish to foster a culture of transparency. In order to demonstrate our trust in our team, we allow our staff to take unlimited personal leave.

Wellbeing

When we founded NOVOS, we wanted it to be different from other big agencies — we wanted to create an agency culture where employee wellbeing is valued as much as employee performance. In order to track the mental wellbeing of our team, we have started using The Happiness Index — a tool created by two ex-agency owners.

We keep it simple & send out 1 question 3 times a week to the team. This question is simple: "How are you feeling today?"

The tool offers anonymous comments, individual and overall scores as well as sentiment analysis.

The data analysis helps us in taking decisions to improve employee wellness. For example, we noticed that lack of exercise impacted happiness negatively. So, we now pay for virtual workout sessions for the team every 2 weeks.

Personal Growth

Our agency strives to be a vehicle for the personal growth of our team. We encourage the staff to upskill and pay for their training & courses.

Onboarding Buddies

As the challenge accentuates when new hires are remotely onboarded, it is important to have measures in place to communicate the company culture to the newly joined members of your team. We have come up with a new initiative of having our existing team members act as 'onboarding buddies' for the new hires. The new team member doesn’t need to be always having calls with their manager or the agency owner. It can also help the new hire get an understanding of non-work culture and have informal chats.

We're Still Learning

Even after employing a variety of measures, we sometimes encounter issues so it will seemingly remain a learning curve for us. Our plans for taking our team on company retreats will have to wait and other amazing team building ideas won't be possible for some time to come. Embracing the current situation and making the best of what we have is all that we can do now as we evolve.

If you're a business owner navigating the workplace culture in the COVID world, I would love to know about your journey. Please feel free to reach me on Linkedin.