Building a remote working culture is hard. Here’s why better technology – that sits in a fully connected ecosystem – is now the great enabler of agile work culture.

The Harvard Business Review defines work culture as “an organisation’s DNA…the shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterise a workplace. It is reflected in how people behave, interact with each other, make decisions, and do their work.”

There is little disagreement about the importance of work culture. Most of the conversations today are around building a healthy one instead.

Jacob Morgan, for example, has published four best-selling books on the future of work, and is also a regular contributor to publications such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Harvard Business Review. In one article, Jacob describes work culture as a kind of emergent property of the office.

“It exists regardless of whether the organisation realises it or decides to create it,” he writes. “This is the only environment that you feel. That feeling is the pit in your stomach when you don’t want to go to work or the excitement and butterflies you get from wanting to go to work.”

But, in our current era of remote work, the cultural shape of a workplace is more closely linked to technology than ever before. And so, while there are many drivers of culture in a company, the right technology helps to provide a foundation in our contemporary context.

The impact of work culture

Work culture has always been important. But this culture now needs to be a potent enough force to overcome any physical distance or a lack of face-to-face interactions. As research from the Office of National Statistics suggests, remote working is now a permanent fixture of professional life.

In the UK, 38% of employees engage in some blend of working from home and from the office. Many of us now work in teams where many of the members are in different locations but employed by the same company.

In such arrangements, technology can be a means to deliberately shape culture, to encourage communication, to facilitate productivity, and, by allowing us to work anywhere and by accommodating life outside of work.

For employers, this deliberate shaping of company culture – by technology and by other means – is worthwhile. For one point of context, 70% of employees said that their sense of purpose is defined by their work, according to McKinsey.

The best cultures allow us to define ourselves in a way that is satisfying. But, even speaking in strictly commercial terms, a healthy culture is worth the squeeze.

88% of employees believe that a healthy culture is vital for the business to succeed, according to one Deloitte survey. Surveys also reveal that many of us (as much as 65%) feel more productive working from home. Another McKinsey study found that, in the wake of the pandemic, 52% of employees would prefer their organisation to adopt more flexible hybrid work models. These preferences matter as, according to one study from Oxford University, happy employees are 13% more productive than unhappy ones.

The first takeaway here is that employees crave meaning from their job. The second would be that employees derive the most satisfaction when they’re allowed to do their job flexibly, in whichever way they feel most productive.

Compounding the need to offer flexibility, employees who are forced to come into work report lower levels of satisfaction than those who can contribute in a hybridised setting, according to a recent report from PWC. Therefore, companies that can cater to our preferences – and empower us to work from anywhere – will reap the benefits. A company that leans into its technology to facilitate more interactions, more collaboration, and a stronger culture will cultivate happier employees.

But technology can do more than connect us when we’re remote.

Emma Parsons, a neuroscientist at MIT, says that multitasking can reduce employee productivity by up to 40%. Of course, It is widely known that multitasking can reduce efficiency, but few of us can avoid needing to do more than one thing at a time. And we also need to be able to switch from having divided attention to being fully immersed in a task that demands total focus.

Under the right conditions, however, companies can make it easier to multitask more efficiently. Businesses today need to design a fluid working culture that facilitates multi-tasking, collaboration, and focused work—and all this is heavily dependent on the technology behind the people.

If the technology behind your business is set up the right way, the result is happier employees, improved retention, better productivity, and a more connected company culture (even when working apart).

What ‘working from anywhere’ means for IT

For most of the 20th century, working in an office during the nine to five meant that, to get away from the office, you needed a good excuse. Most office work meant being tethered to desks.

‘If the technology behind your business is set up the right way, the result is happier employees, improved retention, better productivity, and a more connected company culture (even when working apart).’

Since then, a lot has changed. Now, with the right technology, we really can work from anywhere. For your IT department, however, few words erect neck hairs more than “anywhere.”

From an IT perspective, there is good reason for a bit of apprehension about remote work. One of the chief jobs of an IT department is keeping company data safe, as failing to can cost millions of pounds and months of time before a hack is resolved. (An IT Governance report found that the average cost of a cyber-attack on a business was £2.9 million per-incident.) For this reason, the approach to building a network in most offices has been to treat the office as a kind of fortress, one server guarding all the computers from bad actors.

Employees have now left the safety of that digital fortress. The consequence is that IT has got a harder job to do than ever; the department needs to make sure each device is protected, that its data doesn’t leak onto vulnerable ones and, of course, that the employees have all the tech kit needed not just to do the job, but can do the job comfortably, anywhere.

The term ‘fluid working’ is what Samsung calls this phenomenon, of working from anywhere. As research shows most of employees prefer a less rigid approach and opt for flexible, personalised arrangements, the term ‘hybrid working’ is too binary and too oversimplified to capture what employees really want.

Staying in touch with the right technology

But companies can refine this approach with technology in mind. Remote work has upended how leaders interact with employees and how co-workers connect with each other. These interactions are the foundation of work culture; sharing ideas and experiences are what drive the essential connections in any culture.

Still, even in our technologically driven age, the biggest impact on culture remains the same: respect.

Cultures focused on respect and transparency flourish. One survey, conducted by the Harvard Business Review, found that respect was the leading behaviour that encourages greater commitment and engagement. Prioritising respect really does change every conversation between colleagues, and it really does motivate employees better than fruit bowls.

Employers can signal respect with greater transparency. Using technology, employers can share business results – by posting them on a public channel, for example – and facilitate open communication in general.

Taking a wider view, most people say their sense of purpose is defined by their work, and so the best cultures allow us to define ourselves in a way that is satisfying. Some of this satisfaction is derived from our interactions with others. Indeed, a big part of our sense of self is constructed from communicating with other people, as research from the University of Washington found.

In a healthy culture, when you speak to someone at work and genuinely enjoy the interaction (because you like this person, you like how he or she feels about their job) those pleasant exchanges are what fuel the cooperation that distinguishes companies where people are happy versus those that are unhappy. In contrast, in toxic work cultures, you can see everyone as a knot in their stomach, feeling undervalued, unheard, and unmotivated.

In a word: unhappy.

Today, part of the challenge is recreating those opportunities for nourishing interactions over the web. Companies need to be able to easily blend a meeting at the office with a few working elsewhere, without stressing about changing a word on a presentation when it’s on your phone.

To this end, all the devices need to talk to each other; you need to switch from one to the other without missing a beat. You need a computer that can seamlessly drop an Excel sheet to your phone, and back again. It’s got to be easy to keep up with your team, and that means if you can’t take a call on a train, or in a food court, then you really aren’t working fluidly, and aren’t reaping the full benefits of this massive cultural shift.

‘Remote work has upended how leaders interact with employees, and how co-workers connect with each other—and our interactions are the foundation of work culture.’

In sum, a healthy workplace culture happens when people work together well. Increasingly, how well we can work together depends on how easily we can share ideas, feedback, and stay up-to-speed on all that’s going on, no matter where we are.

Read on for four reasons why fluid working culture – enabled by technology – helps to foster a healthy, happy company culture.

1. Fluid work makes most employees happier.

The opportunity for fluid work impacts employees’ happiness. We now glimpse our colleagues with elaborate laundry-drying setups, prying kittens from keyboards, answering questions posed by children at the most inopportune moments. 

This new intimacy, as it happens, breeds unexpected camaraderie.

One study by YouGov & Microsoft showing that 56% of the cohort surveyed reported an uptick in their happiness levels when they work from home, as it brings us closer (when we’re remote).

Employees, when able to work fluidly, are happier and more productive, and this translates into less turnover, lower costs, and higher revenue.

2. Fluid working makes ‘deep work’ easier.

Sometimes, employees need to take the opportunity to engage in something called ‘deep work,’ a term coined by the author Cal Newport.

He defines deep work as a “professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

The office can be full of distractions and it’s important for some people to take time away from the office to get their projects completed. This is enabled more than ever by the fact that the technology is portable.

Enabling employees to work remotely without being at a disadvantage—which means, not having the right technology.

3. When you opt for a fluid working style, your talent pool gets deeper.

Today’s technology enables us to work from anywhere, which in turn opens huge opportunities for businesses to hire people that they otherwise normally wouldn’t.

As this article in Forbes points out, a fluid working style, where remote work is a component, makes your company more inclusive, unlocking access to more diverse talent, including people who cannot afford to live in a pricey city, working mothers, and the disabled.

4. A connected ecosystem of technology best enables fluid working.

When your computer, phone, and tablet are all connected, and there are major productivity benefits to this connected ecosystem.

Need to jump from working on your Galaxy Z Fold4 phone to your laptop? You can switch with ease between your phone and your Samsung Galaxy Book. Just add a monitor1 or use your Galaxy Tab S8​ as a second screen for an extended display.

And, in the Galaxy ecosystem, you only need one wire to juice up all your devices. The Galaxy Book powers up via the same compact​ USB-C charger as any compatible Samsung Galaxy device (such as the Z Fold4 smartphone or Tab S8 tablet.)

Galaxy devices don’t just work together—they work together seamlessly.

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