This is an excerpt from my chapter in IR Global‘s latest publication ‘A Global Guide for In-House Counsel’, which you can download here.

Here are my top tips for preserving company culture and retaining staff in flexible working arrangements:

✔️ Preserving workplace culture requires careful thought about a company’s values and how to cultivate and encourage employees to embrace them. Employers need to develop new and interesting ways for employees to communicate with each other and get to know co-workers not in a centralised location. This may involve virtual coffee breaks, participatory activities, new ways to air concerns, as well as informal discussion and mentoring. Digital connections don’t in-and-of-themselves bind people together like personal working relationships ideally can do.

✔️ The most common complaints I hear from departing employees include the lack of training, inadequate supervision and the absence of enough person-to-person contact, including no real relationship with one’s supervisor. Not all employees work well remotely, and many supervisors are ineffective with employees who they don’t personally interact with on a regular basis.

✔️ Management training is more critical with the transition towards a transient workforce. Employers must reconsider how to incentivise and assess performance and how to communicate both strengths and shortcomings in a way that supports individual development. The shift towards a transient workforce is a major societal change requiring new thinking about optimal ways that people may work together while working apart.