A healthy workplace culture is essential in helping both employees and employers to thrive, so what can organisations do to improve workplace culture in a hybrid-working world? Patrick Gallen explains.

As we emerge from the pandemic and begin to reflect on what will change in the new hybrid environment, there has been a lot of talk about office culture.

The pandemic has given organisations an opportunity to review the challenges and opportunities presented by the pandemic-driven work-from-home experience.

Taking everything they have learned on board, they can now rethink, reshape and improve workplace culture, creating the best possible hybrid working experience for their employees.

What is ‘culture’?

Workplace culture is a shared set of attitudes and behaviours that affect how people interact at work. It can have a huge impact on an organisation’s effectiveness.

The days of wandering through an office and getting a feel for the vibe of the place – intuitively assessing body language and interpersonal interactions – are over. Managers need to acquire tools and skills that can help them evaluate employee relationships and gauge productivity, without relying exclusively on in-person observation.

Healthy cultures create tremendous corporate value – up to threefold higher returns to shareholders than that earned by companies with unhealthy cultures, according to McKinsey research. The question is not whether a company’s culture is ‘strong’ in itself but whether it serves the employees and the business.

The evolution of workplace culture

Before COVID-19, workplace culture mainly emphasised the importance of the firm’s productivity and profit above all, but organisations can’t expect to return to the same culture that existed in 2020.

There’s been too much change, both at the individual and business level. This crisis has created an opening for organisations to experiment and adapt their policies and practices.

From an organisational point of view, during this global disruption, we saw offices with healthy cultures prioritise the needs and well-being of their employees while continuing to meet (or even exceed) profit and productivity goals.

Employees, on the other hand, saw their personal and professional lives converge during the pandemic and were given room to reconsider their priorities.

Working from home highlighted the challenges of work–life balance. It also revealed which elements of the in-person workplace are most important to employees, and which are dispensable or even detrimental – long commutes, for example. Remote work has enabled workers to reconsider the meaning and purpose of their jobs.

Prioritising employee needs

Now that we are entering the next phase of this pandemic, consultation on employee needs must be at the top of leaders’ agendas, whether it is about hybrid work, work-life balance or ESG initiatives within the organisation. Employees have had the opportunity to re-evaluate their values, and they want to see these values reflected in their workplace culture.

The future of the workplace must emerge from a dialogue between employees and leaders. Employees want their needs considered when finding the right balance between returning to the office environment. Leaders should, therefore, solicit and carefully consider employee feedback about the advantages and disadvantages of in-office versus remote work.

Now is the time to reshape workplace policies and corporate culture to accommodate what works best, technologically and socially, for a business and its people. Leaders must adopt new, appropriate managerial approaches, model best practices and clearly communicate their rationale and purpose.

A healthy workplace culture that works for its people and business is not only the right thing to do, but can also positively impact the bottom line. It is vital that companies take the steps needed to strike the right balance.

Patrick Gallen is People and Change Consulting Partner at Grant Thornton.