The Business Journal
By Heinan Landa – Contributing Writer | Aug 12, 2021, 4:05am EDT
More than a year after the pandemic turned much of the workforce virtual, fewer than 1 in 5 business owners intends to return to pre-pandemic office conditions, and the majority of U.S. workers want to maintain some regular telework schedule going forward.
Ultimately, most of us will settle into hybrid work where some employees are in the office and some are working remotely on any given day.
While hybrid work offers many benefits to our teams — and by extension our businesses — it also opens the door to a number of subtle culture killers that can do serious damage to engagement and retention.
Top 4 unexpected culture killers
1. Meetings
As tired as we may be of all-virtual meetings on Zoom or Teams, in this format each participant takes up the same amount of space, has the same means of contributing, and experiences that meeting the same way.
Now, consider a meeting where half the participants are in the office and half are at home. Can the remote participants distinguish who is speaking when? Do they have the same access to whiteboarding or visuals? How hard will it be for them to interject and be heard?
A return to the office also means a return to spontaneous chit-chat that snowballs into breakthrough ideas. Do you have a way to quickly pull more people into a conversation on the fly? Is collaborative note-taking an option?
2. Team-building
