How Culture Can Flourish in the New Normal

Peter Drucker rightly said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. An inclusive high-performance culture is an enduring competitive advantage. We establish rituals and practices in the office, model desired behaviors, and lead by example to shape company culture.

This works well when most employees are in office, where employees learn culture through osmosis.

But the transition to work from home (WFH) in 2020 completely changed the rhythm of organizations. Suddenly, the concept of “company culture” had to quickly evolve. This was especially the case with new-hires who had never met their colleagues or manager in-person, and culture was only seen through Zoom calls and emails.

As we start planning for the return to work post-pandemic, the future is bound to be hybrid. How will company culture permeate in this new normal?

The short answer is, we must rethink and re-imagine how organizational culture evolves. One of the biggest challenges of a hybrid work environment is the creation of an office “in group” and a WFH “out-group”. In other words, the employees that come to the office regularly are able to form and strengthen relationships that face-to-face interactions enable—they are part of an “in group”. Whereas those that WFH more often don’t benefit from the kind of relationship-building that in-person interactions bring; therefore, the “out group”.

This dichotomy is likely to present unique challenges to providing a consistent work experience for all employees and in re-shaping company culture. To navigate this, we need to adopt a “remote-first” mindset.

There are many valuable learnings from the past 18 months of WFH that we can apply to the hybrid work environment. Here are eight lessons that we learned and practiced at Cadence during the WFH phase that will influence the future new normal.

1. Inclusion and participation: “All online” or “all in-person” meetings give everyone a consistent experience and opportunity for inclusion and participation, even when only some of the team members are regularly in the office. This creates a level playing field. Those of us who have participated in conference calls with our colleagues from across the globe in the past know from experience that when there is one group in a room and a few individuals who are remote, the ability of those who are remote contributing to the discussion can be limited. While in-person interaction remains the best way to integrate new team members, build strong relationships, and shape culture, a judicious balance of fully virtual and in-person interactions will be the best practice going forward.
2. Leveraging technology for collaboration: Before the pandemic, we used collaboration tools for basic functions like file sharing and tele-conferencing. Once we moved to WFH in 2020, we suddenly realized that we needed to leverage technology for collaboration, not just file sharing, and not just within Cadence either. Functionality of some of these tools allows for discussions with customers, team meetings, chat, and sending calendar invites without touching Outlook, adding meeting minutes, and more. With one of the tools that we use at Cadence, the biggest advantage is that one can see when people who are using the app are online, even if they are outside the organization, so that connecting becomes easy. I foresee that this is something that is going to continue even in the hybrid world.
3. Intentional, planned, purposeful interactions: We should stop of thinking about the office as a place we go to work every day. We must think of the office as “the new off-site” and be more deliberate about what we want to accomplish when we are in the office. We must purposefully plan for team interactions as well as cross-team interactions, especially activities like new-hire onboarding, team building, brainstorming, and collaboration. During the WFH phase, a lot has been done to strengthen communication and collaboration within teams. As we move to a hybrid model, we need to be more deliberate in creating opportunities for cross-team interaction and collaboration.
4. Empowering employees with flexibility:  One of the most significant changes during the WFH period is that we have offered a lot more flexibility to our team members, recognizing that they have to balance work, home and family priorities simultaneously. People have adjusted to this new paradigm and expect it to continue going forward. Therefore, the hybrid future has to allow flexibility as to when, where and how employees want to do the work. Managers will have to plan the team’s time in the office and communicate expectations clearly.
5. Emphasis on well-being and mental health: Most organizations have prioritized employee safety and wellbeing through the pandemic. The stress and anxiety caused by the situation have brought mental health to the forefront of the conversation. This is a paradigm shift that is here to stay.
6. Talking about culture: Leaders need to consciously and explicitly talk about culture and send clear signals about desired behaviors through their actions. The modeling of behaviors and implicit transmission of culture that usually happens in an in-person office setting does not translate into a WFH or virtual scenario. The signals are harder to detect and interpret in a remote setting. Therefore, explicit dialog and storytelling become very important for WFH and hybrid environments. An example: For the first time, we had had an online meeting with more than 200 new hires and leaders during which the leaders talked about the company culture. Apart from the actual discussion, attendees also picked up cues about the culture from the banter between the panelists, many of whom have known and worked with each other for years at Cadence. This meeting was significant because these new hires, who had not yet had the chance to observe company culture through in-person interactions, were able to get a sense of it virtually.
7. More frequent interactions with senior management: Since we moved to remote working, there have been more opportunities for senior executives and the teams across geographies and time-zones to connect, making executives more accessible and approachable. Employee roundtables and connect sessions have allowed our global workforce to interact with senior executives more than we ever thought possible in the old paradigm of in-person meetings only. They gave new meaning to our culture of openness and accessibility. This is a best practice that should continue after we return to work in the office.
8. Wider reach of virtual meetings: We have found that participation in virtual employee Q&A sessions and all-hands meetings—both the ones aired “live” and those watched later as a recording—is far higher than we ever saw with live, in-person events. When we return to work, virtual and recorded meetings are a good way to ensure that employees are given every opportunity to listen to leaders and ask questions.

Summary

We have already learned many lessons from working from home, and as we move to a hybrid environment, we will have to continue with some of the best practices to propagate a strong organizational culture. To be successful in the new normal, we must carry forward practices we have developed through the WFH period and judiciously balance virtual and in-person interactions with a remote-first mind-set.