What does company culture look like in a world of remote work?

By Keith Lynch, Country Manager, Red Hat Ireland

After a year of upheaval, it’s becoming clear that remote work is here to stay. As remote work was largely untested in Ireland outside the larger tech companies, there was an initial rush to implement digital solutions to maintain day-to-day activities. However, now that most companies have settled into a routine of remote work, many companies have started considering their long-term remote work strategies and, crucially, how it might impact their business on a cultural level.

Company culture a world of remote work

The Irish government is encouraging longer term remote work and, via legislation being introduced later this year, has recognised the important impact this flexibility will have on the working culture of the nation. Crucially, this legislation will place the employee at the heart of the issue, allowing individuals the right to request remote work.

The benefits for employees are clear; less time and money spent commuting, greater flexibility of hours and location, and greater control of work/life balance. However, while less immediately obvious, it is important to recognise that businesses can also benefit from this remote work shift if they are able to adapt accordingly.

The loss of ‘office culture’

With a distributed workforce, there will undeniably be a loss of certain aspects of company culture. Team camaraderie is very difficult to reproduce remotely and the loss of the office will result in a reduction of casual conversations and non-verbal communication. Collaboration tools can be excellent for maintaining or even improving productivity, but they cannot replicate face-to-face interactions.

It can be difficult when faced with these drawbacks for businesses to see the benefits. But rather than considering the ‘loss’ of office culture, they would be better served to think of this as a completely fresh start. Company culture should not be intrinsically tied to a place, and changes that benefit the individual employees should be embraced, as they will inevitably help the team as a whole.

Trust-based vs rules-based culture

It is useful to consider existing distributed groups and communities as good examples of how remote working culture can manifest. Open source communities can be a good inspiration here. By their very nature, they are decentralised and distributed groups of individuals, working together collaboratively to achieve a common goal. Each community will have its own distinct culture, but they are driven by a freedom and creativity that transcend any guiding rules or principles.

At Red Hat, we have been taking inspiration from open source communities for decades, and always aim to prioritise the freedom and creativity that enables employees to produce their best work. In a business context, of course, there are necessarily more rules, but this freedom might involve flexibility of working hours to allow staff to better accommodate childcare needs, or promoting goals-based benchmarking.

This mindset requires putting a great deal of trust in your employees, and I believe that’s one of our biggest cultural strengths – if you can’t trust your staff to do the best work they can, you’ve hired the wrong people. We have accommodated remote working arrangements for almost a decade, and believe that our values of freedom and accountability naturally balance each other out. We empower the team with the freedom to work within their own time constraints, and ensure that they have accountability for their own results.

Culture is a process not a goal

It’s important to remember that no company has a fixed, universal culture. While it’s a useful umbrella term to guide a company’s overarching goals and values, implementation of this ‘culture’ will always be local. Consider, for example, a large company with offices around the world – it is unrealistic to expect that a Japanese office will have the same culture as their colleagues in Saudi Arabia, or indeed, Ireland.

In addition, these ‘subcultures’ that exist within an organisation will also exist at a local level. Sales teams often have distinct cultures from marketing or human resources teams, for example. Far from being a hindrance, this allows individual employees to thrive naturally in environments that best suit them. The work from home environment should similarly be viewed as a form of company culture, and embraced as an opportunity for organisations to revisit where their priorities lie.

At Red Hat, we place the emphasis on individual employees and empower them to build their own cultures, around shared interests, locations or teams. For example, associates are running their own remote yoga or ‘coffee and catch up’ sessions, and when we’ve been at restriction levels lower than five, we’ve made our Dublin, Cork and Waterford offices available for limited and responsible collaboration. We encourage ‘Communities of Practice’ to bring people together and help contribute to our company culture.

Remote work is likely here to stay, in one form or another, so it’s imperative that businesses take up this opportunity to learn and improve. A company’s culture is a cornerstone of its success, especially when it comes to talent management and retention. Instead of focusing on what we miss from our offices, we should try to embrace what has worked well from remote working and build a long-term, sustainable working culture that best serves the needs of businesses and their employees.

Bio: Keith heads up Red Hat’s Irish business. Open Source has become the default path to accelerate innovation, transform business models and is at the core of technologies leading change in the technology industry and many others. 

Keith believes that getting technology choices right is less than half the battle, organisational change and technology delivery can be far more disruptive and difficult to deliver. Open Source principles applied to culture can be as much a catalyst for change in people and process as they are in technology. He is a passionate believer in defaulting to open, whether that applies to code or culture.

See more stories here.