Remote work - A better pulse on organization and culture

By: Merita Vilen (MBA, M.Sc.), Culture and Change Management Consultant, Hofstede Insights

Sep 23, 2020 | 2 minutes read | Aplomb Cloud in partnership with Hofstede Insights | Read Part-1 here

This article is part 2 in a series of articles by Merita Vilen on Remote Working and its implications.

How to make sure people work when you cannot see them working? It is an interesting question a lot of managers are thinking even if they may not say so. Setting the right company culture is key to answering that question. Adopting a modern IT infrastructure such as Office 365 with functionality like workplace analytics enables more efficient working and better productivity whilst still getting insights about the remote workforce.

Delivering customer projects and get things done in a timely manner in remote work mode also depends on organisation culture. Every company has a culture; however small or new it might be. It is typically the founders who have had the biggest impact how things are done. They set the example by their own behaviour when setting up the company. But there is a lot more to culture.

It is not about being good or bad. Culture is about being functional or dysfunctional. The difference being that a functional culture enables change, the other not so. Change capability of a company is one those of those critical factors that cannot be emphasised enough. Have you ever measured what your current culture is like? There are tools that can measure and define culture. When you know the baseline then you are able to plan your change roadmap more to fit the new work environment and enabling better technology adoption.

Regarding remote work, your company might be going towards a hybrid solution. It requires cloud computing services to be deployed. It would allow people to have freedom to choose depending on the situation, working practices or a customer. Does your culture support it? Is it practical in your context? These types of answers would be provided by a culture assessment and strategy.

One should look at organisational and cultural aspects along with IT solutions, and analyse current ways of working before deploying Cloud solutions. Equally important it is to have a clear strategy for it in place before embarking on your cloud journey. It saves money and costs in short-term but even more in a longer term.

Next time I’ll discuss Change Management and how to go about change planning and why it is crucial for IT deployment success. Sign up for email alerts and join me in part 3.

Did you know that having a comprehensive and coherent strategy towards remote working can save you time and efforts on rejigging them in the long-term? Read more about remote access strategy here.

Find out more about the services Aplomb Cloud offers here.