Build Community and Enhance Company Culture with Digital Presentation Tools

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to switch from in-person work environments to remote work settings, making it hard for employees to build tight-knit communities or cohesive and collaborative company cultures.

Research has revealed a massive jump in the number of people working remotely once the pandemic struck. Nearly 44% of people surveyed indicated they work for 5+ days remotely, a jump from 17% before the pandemic struck.

While remote work is already a challenging prospect for workers established at a particular firm, onboarding new employees and ensuring those workers connect with team members and company culture can be even more difficult. Digital presentation tools, however, have proven an effective solution towards building interpersonal relationships among co-workers.

Why Focus on Community?

It’s easy for employees to feel isolated and disconnected from their team when working remotely. This feeling of alienation can hurt motivation levels as workers begin to feel increasingly isolated from the bigger, collective effort.

Nurturing a community feeling helps to dispel such notions and keeps your employees engaged and stimulated. This in turn helps to boost productivity and strengthen the overall cohesiveness of your business. Creating a mentoring program, for example, could have positive effects on performance, interpersonal relations, and job satisfaction according to research by the Seattle-based startup TINYpulse.

Their research contends that employees who are mentored and who receive recognition from colleagues ramp up quickly not only on productivity but on the relationships front as well so they're able to contribute fully from day one instead of feeling constrained and disconnected.

Connecting With Employees During the Pandemic

With remote work becoming the norm in an unprecedented, pandemic-afflicted era, it's not just the lack of face time that makes connecting with employees difficult. The fact that there are no meetings or personal interactions whatsoever among co-workers—a key element when trying to cultivate relationships necessary for fostering high morale in the office environment as well as increasing productivity—means that employees can easily start to feel disconnected.

The lack of connection can be mitigated through corrective action, even as remote work continues post-pandemic. One such solution is to use digital presentation tools that reorder this dynamic by replacing the physical meeting room with a virtual one; where team members gather from around the world almost instantaneously to share updates, conduct brainstorming sessions, or map out a game plan.

Ingage will further enable you to create tailored interactive presentations for your employees that includes a variety of team-building and fun activities:

• Trivia nights
• Work happy hours
• Company culture events
• Interactive games

You can use presentations in your video meetings too. This helps to drive home the message while keeping the meeting engaging and interactive.

Additionally, you should also leverage the following tips to further connect with your employees:

• Send personal messages to check in on them
• Facilitate virtual water cooler discussions
• Have non-work-related discussions
• Encourage employees to have casual discussions among teams

The idea is to bring the human element back into working relationships and recreate the kind of atmosphere that existed when teams were interacting in the office.

Building Community Using Digital Presentation Tools

When you’re in a co-located office environment, the workplace develops its own personality. This could be through shared experiences while working in proximity and in a collaborative environment. In addition, light-hearted banter also helps to enable such a culture.

All of this adds to the community culture of your business and it’s exactly this type of culture that you need to replicate when managing your remote team. Developing this kind of traditional office space environment, though, requires extra effort. “It takes mindfulness, intention, and rethinking how your employees work together,” says Anna Savina, a Content Marketing Manager.

Digital presentation tools like Ingage can help to build your community virtually. You can seamlessly create interactive presentations and share them with your employees to create an engaging climate that helps employees feel that though far away, they are connected. You can incorporate collaborative tools to strengthen your communication and build such a community.

For example, Ingage helped a company recreate the Jeopardy board game on their interactive presentation software platform. By incorporating buttons into the presentation, members could reveal the answers with a simple click. You could also create before/after photo challenges using the slider button to guess who’s baby photo was on the screen. You also have to option to adjust the accessibility of a presentation so that everyone has the chance to add a comment using buttons.

Developing Company Culture in Remote Setting

In addition to connecting with employees and building a community spirit, it’s also important to develop your company culture while working with remote teams. Here are some suggestions:

Use More Visual Communication

With remote-based operations, video can help you communicate more effectively with your team and also note their reactions. However, a visual element is needed to replace the traditional paper or static presentation aid. That’s where Ingage’s digital presentation platform enters the fray.

With Ingage, you can create a presentation and add dynamic visual elements such as charts and diagrams. You can then share it with your team so that they’re all able to see it in real-time while you’re talking. Your team can in turn interpret the data and ask questions and seek clarity, enabling an engaging, interactive discussion, and importantly, making the team feel connected. Whether you’re conducting meetings, presenting pitches, or even new ideas, visual elements can help you convey your message clearly.

Use Visuals for Employee Onboarding

When managing the onboarding process for remote teams, you need a solid plan and platform to onboard your new employees so can you can effectively relay your company culture to them. Your plan can entail some or a combination of the following pointers:

Develop a 2-week plan: Developing a plan and setting time frames will reduce the stress and anxiety new hires can have.

Start small: Map a clear plan to help the employee know what onboarding will look like 30, 60, or 90 days out. Assign them small tasks at first and check in regularly.

Onboard in groups: A great way to minimize processes and redundancies during onboarding, it also creates a sense of community among new hires.

To ensure maximum retention, incorporating digital presentation tools like Ingage into this process can help you to drive home the company’s core values, mission and mandate. Using interactive online presentations enables you to showcase the core pillars guiding your organization, and explain why these need to be top-of-mind for new recruits.

Build Affinity and Avoid Alienation

For remote employees, the absence of a traditional office culture is often hard to deal with. That’s why it’s so important to put effort into building a community in your company and to engage them on a personal level. So, as crucial as it is to get up to speed on the production front, it’s equally important to develop interpersonal teammate relations. This will achieve more cohesive team bonding and motivate your employees as they’ll feel that they’re a part of the bigger picture.

Today’s modern work environment means company culture is vital. So you must be able to build and maintain a vibrant company culture even while working with remote staff. This was reinforced by a recent Glassdoor survey finding that 56% of employees consider a dynamic workplace to be more important than salary.

In just a few clicks, Ingage can help you create customized digital presentations for these challenging tasks. Get in touch with us today for a free demo.

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