Work from home just got extended! What seemed to be a stop gap solution is now Business as Usual. However, there is a gap. Your employees are working alone and that could disturb the social fabric that binds your organisation.
We humans are social animals, dependent on trust. And trust comes from a sense of common values and beliefs. We seek commonality, which is why we love networking, meeting people, creating random connections through various engagement platforms. Basically, in today’s scenarios there are No CSR activities taking place, No Coffee breaks, No Smoke breaks, No Cafeteria Activities, No Townhalls etc. That means that there are no new shared experiences being created that can trigger a commonality to bind your employees together.
“What starts as an exception, becomes routine. And that is when we start to ask for more”.
As a business, our priority during lockdown was to get our business up and running. It is now over 60days, and most business have crossed that hurdle. But Now comes the difficult part – maintaining the performance levels and now ensuring that how we can push performance to deliver better for our clients.
Yes! It is a demanding ask, however, to survive we need to push the envelope. Businesses today must go beyond the basic levels of engagement and create a shift from ‘Engaging to work’ to ‘Engaging to perform.’
Businesses evolve over time and with that the culture too evolves, a culture, that is co-created with the social animals within your environment that define who you are. Every business has their own formula to engage their audience, but with movement restrictions today, can we as a business help in creating that same environment that stimulates a much-needed break that keeps your employees charged.
In the normal day, life of an employee could be quite different for each employee. Compare the social life of a single Individual V/s a Married individual. Their form of engagement at the office space is quite different, where, the Single individual looks are the office as a break from bring alone, whereas the Married individual could see it as a break from the regular family routine. What we must understand is that the office, your place to work, offered more than just work, that created the vibe which transcended into performance.
But now our very definition of normal has changed. The line between work and home has been blurred. And the need to have the bubble that satisfies the social quotient just got higher.
Given the right tools, recreating your physical environment into a virtual space is not that difficult. And not I am not talking about video conference apps or other social media platforms, those are just channels, It’s what you do on these channels that make the difference.
So remember, next time you connect with your teams, ask yourself this question, am I engaging you to work or Engaging you to perform!