Building a company with a strong and progressive culture is a Top 3 priority for any CEO. About 37% of job seekers evaluate a company’s culture before applying for the job.
In the co-located work system, teams still had room to interact and help new employees adapt to their company’s work culture.
But today, when 69% of companies have at least one member working remotely, how can teams motivate remote employees to understand and adopt the company’s culture and values?
Surely, the old method of beer, ping pong tables, and team outings won’t be suitable given the current situation of COVID-19. So, what’s the solution?
Hiring culture fit candidates. That is easier said than done. Hiring culture-fit candidates ensure that teams can focus on reinforcing culture rather than introducing it.
Now, no need to panic! By the end of this post, you will know how to build a remote work culture using the magical wand of psychometric testing.
What is Remote Work Culture?
Before understanding the remote work culture, let’s learn about culture first. A company’s culture can be categorized into different sections such as
- General Social Believes – The general social beliefs and norms of the company define its culture, such as religious, racial, and other social engagements.
- Preset Faiths – When a company forms, a set of goals, objectives, attitudes, and values defined are a major part of its culture.
- Characteristic Traits – The values, social practices, and conventions associated with the company represent its characteristics.
Remote work culture is similar to your company’s internal culture, but remotely. When people don’t connect with each other, personally, their interests and beliefs are going to tie them together. If your company culture promotes hard work from Monday to Friday and a full party on Saturday and Sunday, you can easily implement it virtually by giving a full weekend off to your remote team. One way to help build remote culture? A weekly splash of fun such as the trivia contests from Water Cooler Trivia.
Why Is Remote Work Culture Important?
Most companies are adopting the remote work culture as the prominent key to hire the perfect candidates for the job role. With the work culture analysis, numerous companies have hired proficient remote employees because they have achieved so many wonderful benefits through this approach –
Cut the Loneliness
It has been surveyed that loneliness is one of the major problems of remote working. When employees are working remotely, they long for human and personal connections, which they receive in the office. The loneliness of remote workers even influences their productivity and leads them to the path of depression. Thus, when you define a remote work culture of hosting informal virtual meetings or events, you can address the loneliness issues of your team and keep them fully contended.
Avoidance of Bad Hire
It is stated by 74% of recruiters that they have hired the wrong person for the job position in the remote work setup. Due to the unrestricted geographical hiring, recruiters have to find the right candidates from a large number of applicants, which increases the chances of bad hiring. But, psychometric testing can be a bulletproof way to ensure that you are hiring culture-fit candidates. When you have hired the right culture-fit candidates, the problem of bad hiring is never going to bug you.
Helps in Retaining the Employees
If employees find the company’s culture unfit or they feel disrespected in the organization, 26% of employees are likely going to leave the job. It means all the trouble that you have gone through to hire a competent employee will go in vain. Thus, if you check the company’s cultural expectations of the candidates before hiring them, you can save yourself from financial and legal pitfalls. Furthermore, you can establish a long work relationship with your remote worker when you are both on the same page.
Chaotic Workflow
Without a well-defined remote work culture, there will be a chaotic workflow in the organization. When remote workers don’t know exactly what they have to do and whom they should report, confusion and conflicts are going to rise a lot. The chaotic work environment will eventually be going to encourage employees to quit their job. Employees have stated that they are likely to stay 23% in the organization if their managers clearly explain their responsibilities.
Economical Hiring
Money is an important part of the hiring process, but not every employee is running behind money. It is presented by 32% of job seekers that they will work at 10% lower rates – if they are working in the right culture. By offering a proactive and strategic remote work culture, you can hire employees at lower rates. Your employees can bear the cost cuts, but they can’t bear poor company culture.
Key to Success
Positive work culture is linked to higher rates of employee engagement, which has been shown to improve productivity and profitability in the end. Around 88% of senior-level employees firmly believe that strong company culture can take the business towards excellence. If you develop a strong and strategic remote work culture today, you are likely going to succeed quickly and effectively.
Experienced Employees
It is a misconception that remote jobs are only millennial jobs. In fact, 65% of employees above 55 years are willing to work from home or remotely. When you can hire highly experienced professionals for your organization remotely at more affordable rates, why do you ever think about hiring freshers? You can gain so much from the experience of senior employees, especially during a crisis. Experience can definitely enrich your company culture further, so make sure to hire some seniors in your remote team.
Loyal Employees
If you are paying attention to the mental well-being of your workers, 57% of workers are going to be more loyal towards your company. Moreover, they are going to take fewer leaves over the year. By building a company culture of analyzing your employees’ mental health from time to time, you can earn loyal workers who are ready to go some extra miles to benefit your company.
How Psychometric Testing fits into your Remote Work Culture
If you are fascinated by the idea of building a remote work culture, you must be looking for an adequate way to hire culture-fit candidates for your organization. For remote organizations, it is pretty hard to build their work culture, but it’s not impossible.
Just like the 75% of The Time Best Companies to Work and 80% of Fortune 500 companies, you can use psychometric testing to hire culture-fit employees. The psychometric testing kit provided by Xobin is divided into two main categories – aptitude and personality tests. The aptitude ensures that you are hiring the well-suited candidates for the role, and personal tests define the ability of an individual to fit into your team. Psychometric testing is like time travel that will show you how your future employees are going to work – even before hiring.
When you are looking for the right culture-fit candidates for your company, you can use psychometric testing to find the perfect employees. In remote hiring, psychometric testing is going to be the immaculate method to find the right candidates because –
Enrich your Company’s Culture
One of the resilient reasons to adopt psychometric testing into your remote recruitment method is to protect and enrich your business culture. Psychometric testing doesn’t impact the kind of candidates applying for the job, but it can indeed help you to pick the best candidates. Using concise reporting, you can eliminate the unfit job applicants from the recruitment funnel and draw a 360-degree competency report of each candidate.
Your company’s culture is something that has been created very carefully, and your sentimental values are attached to it. Thus, if you hire a bad culture fit candidate, it’s going to ruin your company’s culture. Moreover, if your hired employee doesn’t like your company’s culture, there are 24% chances that he or she will quit the job. To safeguard your company’s culture and your financial resources, you should use psychometric testing tools.
Smooth Training of New Employees
When you analyze the personality attributes of your remote employees, you can make sure that the first few weeks of the training go smoothly. Psychometric testing gives you a fair idea about what motivates your new recruit so that you can help them effectively in understanding the work style of your organization. While it is pretty difficult to assert how a particular person is going to react under the new conditions, psychometric testing can be a great help in asserting the behavior of an individual.
For instance, sales representatives need to possess multiple skills, including good communication, advanced IQ, IT knowledge, and so much more. If you found in the psychometric testing that your remote worker has slightly poor communication skills, you can provide communication training to him in the initial days and improve the productivity of the new employee.
Useful in Maintaining Talent Pool
According to Glassdoor’s HR & Recruiting Stats for 2018, 76% of recruiters say that attracting top talent is a big problem for them. With psychometric testing, this gigantic problem of the recruiters can be easily resolved with the multilayered testing components. In a psychometric testing platform like Xobin, all the tests are validated based on popular psychometric theories. Thus, the candidates can be tested on numerous levels before entering your organization.
Psychometric testing can streamline the hiring process smoothly so that you can shortlist the cream of the top cream. This process will effortlessly streamline your recruitment process because you are interviewing the best candidates only. Moreover, you can create a talent pool of competent candidates so that you can anytime contact talented individuals and hire for your organization.
This way, you don’t have to go through the hassle of an advertising job whenever you need to hire a new remote candidate – you can easily pick the right candidates from your personal talent pool.
Sustainable Work Environment
The responsibilities of managers don’t end with the right recruitment – no, they have to measure the performance and satisfaction level of the employees from time to time. But, when you have used psychometric testing in the recruitment process, you don’t have to closely monitor the satisfaction and performance of employees. That’s because remote employees are already familiar with the work culture, so they aren’t doing anything new or going out of their comfort zone.
Psychometric testing can reduce the responsibilities of managers and improve the experience of the employees.
Other Best Practices
Psychometric testing is a prominent way to develop remote work culture in your organization, but it’s not the only way. There are plenty of other different practices that you can follow to create a positive remote culture in your organization such as –
Defining the Measuring Standards
It is essential to hire new employees based on the company’s culture, but how can you measure the culture level. You have to foremost set a bar to compare the cultural values of your new recruiters. To find a measurable bar, you have to analyze your current employee’s cultural values and use it as a base to measure your new employees. With the help of Multiple Situational Judgement Tests and Workstyle Psychometric Tests, you can easily measure the culture of your current employees.
Develop an Onboarding Plan
Merely 12% of employees say that they are happy with the onboarding plan developed by their organization. Thus, if you prepare a proper boarding plan for your remote workers, you can easily build a remote work culture. Especially when you are onboarding full-time workers, it’s going to take more time.
You should break your onboarding plans into smaller segments like 30, 60, or days plans. First, you can give small tasks to them and closely monitor how well they have performed. This will minimize efforts and redundancies during the onboarding process.
Some companies prefer to use a buddy system to better analyze the performance of their new recruiters. For instance, companies pair one current employee with a new employee to establish a good onboarding system. With psychometric testing, employers can pair employees together so that new employees can learn from old employees.
If psychometric tests state that your new employee has weak communication skills, you can pair him or her with an old employee who has proficient communication skills. This way, you can easily strengthen the skills of your new employees.
Understanding the Workstyle of Individual Employee
With psychometric testing, you can analyze the workstyle and pressure points of each individual. Some employees perform better when they are working under constant monitoring, and some prefer to work independently. On the other hand, some people like to be recognized, and some just want to work in the shadow. Around 27% of employees stated that they had quit their job because they didn’t get well-deserved recognition.
Thus, when you run a psychometric test to analyze the behavior of your new recruits, you can handle individual employees as per their work style.
Communication is the Key
To build a strong and high-performing remote work culture, you have to establish a systematic flow of communication. Without the proper communication system, you can’t convey the vision of your company to new recruits. It is a clear and concise manner to describe the mission and objective of your organization. You should maintain proper communication between your remote employees so that they can streamline the work process.
Regular Training and Development
Once you have hired culture fit employees, you can’t leave them on their own to develop – no, you have to constantly provide them training. Even 42% of millennials want to work in a business organization where they have a fair chance to develop.
For the regular training purpose, you can use function and role-specific psychometric traits to understand and benchmark the team against your competency matrix. With the solid data, you can mark which employee required more training and which less. This way, you can dedicate more to training less competent employees.
Comprehensive Talent Pool
If you are a constantly growing company, you always require the right culture fit candidates to take your business ahead. Thus, using the comprehensive leadership ability tests, you can create a pool of talented employees -internal as well as external. Now, whenever you have to hire a new person or have to promote your current employees, you just have to look at the competency data and make your data-driven decision.
Providing Mental Support
During the COVID-19 crisis, numerous jobs come into danger or turned into remote jobs. This makeshift has emotionally disturbed many employees and negatively impacted their productivity. Thus, if companies use the big5 test to identify individuals who score low in ‘E’ – Emotional Stability, they can keep on the highly sentimental employees during the crisis. Psychometric testing helps in the situation to properly preserve the emotional data to use at the right time.
Remote Work Culture – A Necessity
Today, if you want to smoothly run your remote work team, you have to develop systematic remote work culture. There’s no confusion that well-defined work culture can provide the right direction to your employees and elevate their performance dramatically. You can use different methods to build a strong remote work culture, but if you start the process with psychometric testing, you can give yourself a solid start. So, let’s make a roadmap to define your remote work culture today because it’s not an option anymore – it is a necessity.
