Navigating Company Culture During COVID-19
CalendarHero’s Head of Operations, Komal Salvi, shares ways to maintain positive company culture during COVID-19 and how organizational values can play a role.
How do you keep a positive company culture during the age of social distancing?
Before COVID-19, a normal day at our office in downtown Toronto usually involved lots of coffee, cracking jokes with coworkers in our physical office, and munching on baked goods (our devs are talented bakers!) in between building the best meeting scheduling experience for our customers.
Now, we’re more than seven weeks into remote working and like many of you, it’s been an adjustment.
Here’s what our first week of remote working looked like →
Despite whatever preconceived notions I or anyone else might have had about a fully-remote company, I’ve recognized that our team has remained as productive and collaborative as ever. Over the past few weeks, we’ve managed to release a number of features like Collaborators and Invitee Questions as well as new integrations with Salesflare, Zapier, Freshworks, Zoho Recruit, Intercom and more.
Despite the fact that we’re no longer physically together, we’re still coming up with ideas, working hard, and connecting with each other every day. I believe our transition to remote working has happened smoothly because of our company culture and values.
The culture at CalendarHero can be boiled down to three core values: collaboration, balance, and respect. The cherry on top of the cake? Our values also come through in the product we’ve built as well.
Collaboration
Meetings (now exclusively virtual) have always been instrumental to the way our company collaborates. Before I heard about CalendarHero, I wasted so much time in meetings focusing on logistics rather than connecting with people. Having great technology at our disposal has been key to maintaining relationships with the team and has enhanced our virtual meeting experience. By using our technology and integration with Zoom.us, we’re able to save time and skip manual meeting tasks, so we can fit in social hangouts like our cocktail/mocktail hours!
Beyond typical business meetings, we’ve found that our virtual social meetings allow us to continue bonding even from afar and give us a glimpse into the lives of the people we work with every day. In our video meetings we’ve seen our teammates’ children (shout-out to Keira, Eddy, and Kate!) and pets who offer notes of levity with their adorable cameos. Also, shoutout to the parents on our team who display “superhuman” abilities by parenting and homeschooling while also doing an incredible job at work.
Balance
We make sure to encourage our team members to take time off to look after themselves and their families. Our motto: if your people are healthy, then your company is healthy! And healthy individuals set themselves up to be sound leaders.
Here’s how our company’s leadership have been exercising balance:
Our CEO Roy has been baking a lot and also offers to deliver groceries or run errands to help out team members.
Jill, our Head of Product, encourages us to work out regularly (HIIT is her fav).
Alexey, our Head of Engineering, has unique ways of letting us know when he’s babysitting his son Eddy by way of Slack status updates. My favourite status update was “Entertaining Eddy” paired with a clown emoji.
Balance is also reflected in the way we do our work. For instance, most of our workload has been automated through CalendarHero. After our client demos, all of our meeting notes and information are pushed back into HubSpot automatically before and after meetings. This leaves us with more time to connect as teammates and focus on our clients instead of worrying about CRM admin work.
Respect
We believe that the way that you work also reflects in the respect that you have for your coworkers. Working at home can be challenging, so it’s important that we respectfully create space for our work and personal lives. In turn, we’re able to bring our “whole selves” to work, so that the rest of the team stays supported and productive.
To make team communication easy, we use Slack to send quick direct messages to our whole company and to individual team members. We also use it to celebrate wins (no matter how big or small), which is essential even in challenging times.
While working remotely, I’ve also come to learn new fun facts about my team!
Kailah loves to dance and can write blog posts at the speed of light (it’s remarkable since I’ve had writer’s block while writing this one 11999988 times)
Joel has three instruments in his bedroom (plays them all) and has serenaded us during one of our virtual cocktail/mocktail hours.
Andy is currently creating his own board game!
Naveen is really into Money Heist.
Maxine has an amazing collection of t-shirts and has inspired us to wear our best graphic tees on Thursdays.
Michael, who I’m dubbing our “baking dev”, continues to whip up tasty treats while remote (we’re just sad that we can’t try any).
I’ve observed that not only is our company culture still strong, but our culture is also fluid and can be translated digitally. Maintaining our culture has helped to keep a sense of purpose on our team intact. After all, purpose is key to achieving goals and staying motivated, especially during social isolation.
Of course, I’m not claiming that this transition has been easy, but empathy, our ability to keep learning, using the right technology, and planning ahead for the coming months have ensured that we’re able to keep our team’s professional lives going with as little friction as possible.
So back to my initial question. How do you maintain positive company culture during the age of social distancing?
As leaders, be vulnerable and open with your team.
Use technology to communicate, collaborate, and reduce your admin workload.
Get to know your team “outside of work” and remember that it’s totally okay not to have your sh** together all the time.
We might be an AI tech company, but we’re all still human after all.
#CultureOverCoronavirus