As organizations shift to remote and hybrid work, everyone is reassessing how to best support their distributed teams. Part of that shift includes maintaining a consistent company culture from afar and creating a robust employee experience centered on transparency. Transparency is often thrown around as a buzzword. But what does it mean to lead with transparency? And how will that clarity help distributed teams?
I’d argue remote work has made organizational transparency more critical than ever. It’s essential to build trust, foster connection, and boost performance — especially as existing employees and new hires are physically disconnected from their teams and managers. A powerful people analytics platform facilitates transparency by offering dynamic visualizations of your entire organization, with context that helps old and new employees understand how they fit into the organization.
Support Remote Hires
The first 90 days of an employee’s time with your organization are crucial. They’re getting a first impression of your business and deciding whether they will stay. Unfortunately, only 12 percent of new hires surveyed by Gallup thought their new company did a good job with onboarding. Add to that the challenges of a completely remote start, and it’s easy to imagine new employees feeling out of sync with their colleagues.
A people analytics platform can give new hires confidence and context, with helpful visualizations of how they fit into the overall structure of an organization. As a centralized hub for all things people, your team can use the platform to create personalized dashboards for new employees and include role-specific onboarding plans, compensation and benefits information and details about team structures. Those new team members can also create and share employee profiles that double as virtual introductions. In addition to their skills, goals and professional interests, they can include hobbies, passion projects and even what they think of as their superpower. Because the whole organization can access those profiles, it’s easier to nurture the connections we used to make in the break room.
Help Remote Workers Make Personal Connections
You used to know where your co-workers were because they were sitting next to you. Or down the hall. Asking to chat about a project was straightforward enough: If you walked by and they weren’t there, you could leave a note on their desk. In recent years, even in shared workspaces, a phone call or an instant message was all it took to start a conversation and find a solution to your problem or gain wisdom to move forward. Distributed teams require foresight around location and schedule so that co-workers can collaborate while respecting their team members’ time and work-life balance.
With a people analytics platform that balances transparency with confidentiality, employees can see their team members on a map, updated with their current location, so it’s easy to understand the best times to reach out. In addition, no exact addresses or other personal details are included, so co-workers know their privacy remains intact while having a clearer view of their teams.
But that’s not the only way organizations use dynamic maps. Over the last two years, nearly every organization has had to think about how its company culture extends beyond the walls of an office. As your company has expanded its talent pool and spread out across the U.S. – and perhaps even the globe – there’s value in helping distributed teams make regional connections and get to know each other in person as they’d like to. Employees can use that dynamic map to see whether they work and live near others at your organization. And just as people didn’t have to work on the same project to enjoy a joke in the lunchroom, remote workers can connect regardless of their department, developing bonds and bringing your company culture anywhere they go.
Keep a Pulse on Employee Experience
The adage of “management by walking around” isn’t available in remote work models, so you’ve got to adjust if you’re going to keep up with your team. Brief, regularly scheduled surveys are one way to keep a pulse on your employees’ engagement, satisfaction and needs, no matter where you are.
An employee Net Promotor Score (eNPS) survey will provide you with both written feedback and a numerical score as a place to start. You can issue eNPS surveys monthly to gauge changes as you respond to apparent needs. Using a people analytics platform lets you analyze feedback across your organization and break it down by dimensions like location and department and by categories, including gender, race, ethnicity and org level. As you gain more insight from these surveys, you can also offer employees options to provide anonymous feedback so they can voice concerns they may not feel comfortable sharing publicly.
Leaders can show remote employees they’re listening by closing the gap between organizations and their people data. Then, when they use that feedback to give team members support and tools, they clear up confusion over policies or offer context about company practices, cultivating trust and strengthening their connection with remote teams.
People Analytics Creates Clarity
Remote teams that work collaboratively and trust each other can’t exist in a vacuum. They need transparency from Day One. They need certainty that managers hear their concerns and the confidence to communicate and connect, no matter the physical distance. By harnessing centralized data and offering insights for people at every level of your organization, people analytics can keep your remote teams connected, give you a pulse on their needs and support your organizational goals.
