Keys to Maintaining a Healthy Remote Workforce

Maintaining a healthy remote workforce is more important than ever. 

The recent Coronavirus pandemic has caused businesses across the globe to send their employees home and establish a remote workforce. Millions of people are working from home for the first time ever, and many of them will remain remote after the outbreak has abated. This presents new challenges and opportunities to employers and employees alike. How do you create and maintain a healthy, aligned, productive remote workforce if you’ve never done it before?

Forma recently did a survey to gauge the impact of Covid-19 on our industry. We’ll be reviewing all the questions and responses in an upcoming series of posts, but today we’re focusing on the responses to a single question: With a remote workforce, what is most important to you?

We received 66 responses out of 305 people that opened our email invitation. The respondents were well distributed across many industries, as seen below:

The results of this survey were illuminating. Respondents were encouraged to choose from the following selections: 

• Morale
• Maintaining Culture
• Maintaining Alignment
• Communication
• Other (write in required)
• N/A

Firstly, if we posed this question to you, how would you answer this question? What would YOU find most important with a remote workforce? Think about this before scrolling further.

Here is a chart of the answers we received. How does your answer compare to our sample?

What do you notice when you look at these results? The largest response is “Communication”, and the scores for Morale, Maintaining Culture, and Maintaining Alignment total exactly 50%. In other words, half of the respondents reported that having a remote workforce required the most attention to maintaining connections and engagement. In effect – alignment, culture, and morale. 

We don’t have similar data from before the start of the pandemic, but it’s doubtful that many of these respondents would have answered the question: “With a non-remote workforce, what is most important to you?” with the answers Maintaining Culture, Maintaining Alignment or Morale. In other words, these aspects are suddenly much more important than they were before the pandemic started. 

The use of archetypes can help with these key concerns. If you’ve been reading our thought leadership, archetypes are patterns that culture has embedded in our brains. We all carry a pattern for Detective, Sage, Scientist, or Caregiver, and these are just some of the thousands of patterns that each of us carry. 

Archetypes were originally used in marketing to differentiate otherwise undifferentiated products and services. The work we have done shows that archetypes can have many other benefits, including the topics of this post: Morale, Maintaining Culture, and Maintaining Alignment. 

There is no better time than now. 

This is a prime opportunity to implement an archetype for your organization. Why? There are two main reasons. 

First, archetypes provide benefits that are very important right now, at least according to the results of our survey. The benefits of archetypes include: 

• Improved employee alignment
• Improved team performance
• Improved employee engagement
• Improved consistency in marketing messages and tone of voice
• Improved differentiation from competitors

Second, your employees are looking for leadership. Gallup.com reports that 

In times of crisis, there are two directions human nature can take us: fear, helplessness and victimization — or self-actualization and engagement. On the latter, if leaders have a clear way forward, human beings are amazingly resilient. There is a documented “rally effect.” 

As one of my business coaches put it: “Employees want to follow a man with a plan.” 

To learn more about how leveraging archetypes can grow your business and align your workforce, visit our Archetypes page. If you’re ready to start the conversation about how Forma can help your brand’s intrinsic archetypal patterns propel you to success during this time of uncertainty, don’t hesitate to contact us today.