I can’t deny it — there is something that excites me about big changes.

Since this crisis started, loads of remote facilitators and experts immediately jumped into the opportunity of offering their services to help businesses adapt to remote working. That’s completely logical and we definitely have a lot to learn from them, but we are missing something here. We have a bigger opportunity than adapting our company culture to remote work — we have the opportunity to re-invent our company culture as a whole.

The current situation has forced most companies and organisations to modify their way of working to a completely new scenario. You can have two different mindsets for it:

Option 1: You can see it as a momentary pause with the status-quo.

Option 2: You can see it as a turning point for big changes.

I don’t expect everyone to feel as excited as I am for taking on option 2. There are companies out there that are satisfied with their company culture and ways of working and are just looking to translate those structures and processes into remote work. But there are probably other companies out there, who have seen the need for improvement, and know that this a golden opportunity to take this crisis as a chance to ask themselves, “how do I want to work from now on?”

I referred to this moment as a golden opportunity for several reasons:

• At moments of crisis, everyone expects things to be burnt down and be rebuilt. Therefore, your team won’t ask you why right now as they’ll understand that this is the right time for changes.

• Some companies are forced to pause their activity for a few weeks, so this the perfect time to reflect and plan ahead for your business.

• Historically, this will be a turning point for society. If your team was sceptical about making changes before, they will believe and take the chance with you now.

The beauty of this is, if you are with me on option 2, you and I believe that this is the time for people, teams and organisations to feel excited about starting from scratch again; to imagine and propose things that might’ve sounded naive before.

Let me ask you this: did you make the most out of your team’s talent? Did you cultivate the type of leadership you wanted for your organisation? Did you implement processes that helped to produce the best outcome for your team and organisation? Did you nurture a culture that empowered your teams to react to any situation?

All of these questions (and many more) are crucial points to provide clear answers right now because, in these exceptional times, our structures and processes will be tested through stress and uncertainty. If you facilitated the right culture in your teamwork, it probably won’t take much effort for your team to adapt remotely or to whatever changes you made during this time. But if failed in creating that culture in your team, you and your team have probably struggled before and will struggle now too.

Re-inventing a company’s team culture requires imagining the options and possibilities. In my case, I imagined two options, each with its own variables:

1. The decision between Empowerment vs Control
   When it comes to processes and ways of working you can decide to either empower or control your team. If you choose to empower your team with trust, you’ll design processes that help them grow on autonomy. But if you choose to control your team, you’ll have to set a culture where they’ll have to report and justify their actions and tasks.

2. The decision to Facilitate vs Force
   If you decide to facilitate your team to do their best, whatever process or structure you’ve imagined will be a natural transition for them. Nevertheless, we have to be careful, as we can sometimes fall into forcing our teams to fit into certain predefined rituals or rules that won’t feel natural and will create discomfort.

It’s up to you to imagine what sort of culture you wish to instil. I don’t think there are any right or wrong decisions here, but there are consequences. If you create a company culture that empowers and facilitates your team’s work, you’ll get an autonomous team who is ready to create answers and propose ways. If you choose to create a controlling and forced culture, you’ll get a dependant team ready to deliver according to someone’s instructions.

The interesting thing here is that any process or ritual can result in a variety of changes, depending on how you approach it. 

Let’s take a weekly meeting as an example; there are many different ways you can implement that ritual in your team:

• As a way to empower and facilitate
  Give teams space and time to communicate on what they consider is important, they will let you know when is the best time and way to tackle the weekly meeting.

• As a way to facilitate and control
  Implement it as a weekly meeting to share tasks, but it can only be done if the manager is present, as s/he will need to know what’s going on and take notes.

• As a way to control and force
  Implement the ritual in the weekly meeting as mandatory to share their report of completed and pending tasks.

• As a way to force and empower
  Use the weekly meeting as a mandatory time for teams to express how they feel, even when it doesn’t feel genuine or the right moment for them to do so.

Thus, everything is a matter of intention and perspective from where you propose your processes, structures and rituals. It’s hard to be conscious about our true-intentions, so when you re-imagine your way of working, ask yourself these questions to see if the solutions you are proposing are supporting one or the other variable:

1. Empower vs control

   • Does it add value to the team or to the management?

   • Is it designed to give power to the team or to make it easier to see if things are done right?

   • Does it distribute power to the team or does it centralise the management end?

2. Facilitate vs force

   • Does it feel natural for the team or does it feels like an imposed rule?

   • Does it run smoothly or does it create pain?

   • Are we trusting the team to do it their way or are we telling them how to do it?

At this moment, most of us are spending more time with our own selves, thinking and evaluating the type of life we have. A lot of us will question why we are doing such things, and as a consequence, “the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job”, as Yuval Noah Harari said.

When this crisis is over, people will start questioning if their work culture gives them meaning and provides them with a healthy community; that’s when some companies will see their talent run away, and other companies will see the ability to form great teams who are ready to take on the next big challenge.

Now is the time.

What kind of team culture do you want to instil?