88% of employees believe a strong company culture is key to business success.

Culture is the character and personality of your organization. It's what makes your business unique and is the sum of its values, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviours and attitudes.

Positive workplace culture attracts talent, drives engagement, impacts happiness and satisfaction, and affects performance. The personality of your business is influenced by everything. Leadership, management, workplace practices, policies, people, and more impact culture significantly.

The pandemic has forced the adoption of new ways of working. Organizations must reimagine their work and the role of offices in creating safe, productive, and enjoyable jobs and lives for employees.

Initially, the pandemic shutdown forced offices to alter their business operations overnight, and to see what a fully remote world looks like Pandemic didn’t give enough time to Leadership, HRs and Facilities to plan the WFH due to sudden rise in +ve cases however, in last over 1.5 years Pandemic there are enough learnings and time being invested on the new workplace design and model.

Work Culture has a strong impact on the productivity at workplace

Culture defines the identity and image of an organization both for internal as well external customers.

Your organizational culture will reverberate across all aspects of your business because it represents the way you do business. It’s simultaneously your identity and your image, which means it determines how your people and customers perceive you.

Creates pull to hire new talent.

Having a great culture and promoting it does help getting best of the talents from the market.  Rather than going behind people, you are able to create a pull for your brand and people look forward joining you.

Keeps the morale high for employees they feel respected, motivated and are more productive. 

One of the greatest advantages of a strong organizational culture is that it has the power to turn employees into advocates.

Your people want more than a steady paycheck and good benefits; they want to feel like what they do matters. And when your people feel like they matter, they’re more likely to become culture advocates—that is, people who not only contribute to your organization’s culture, but also promote it and live it internally and externally.

Helps you retain best of your employees

It should come as no surprise that employees who feel like they’re part of a community, rather than a cog in a wheel, are more likely to stay at your company. In fact, that’s what most job applicants are looking for in a company.

Ask any top performer what keeps them at their company and you’re bound to hear this answer: the people. It’s because a workplace culture focused on people has profound appeal. It helps improve engagement, deliver a unique employee experience, and makes your people feel more connected.

Core-values and Positive surroundings

Your culture can be a reflection (or a betrayal) of your company’s core values. The ways in which you conduct business, manage workflow, interact as a team, and treat your customers all add up to an experience that should represent who you are as an organization and how you believe a company should be run. In short, your culture is the sum of your company’s beliefs in action.

Conclusion

The culture at your organization sets expectations for how people behave and work together, and how well they function as a team. In this way, culture can break down the boundaries between siloed teams, guide decision-making, and improve workflow overall. On the flip side, a toxic organizational culture has the capacity to do just the opposite.

According to McKinsey research, 80 percent of people questioned report that they enjoy working from home. Forty-one percent say that they are more productive than they had been before and 28 percent that they are as productive.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/reimagining-the-office-and-work-life-after-covid-19

COVID-19 has brought human and humanitarian challenges. Many companies around the world have risen to the occasion, acting swiftly to safeguard employees and migrate to a new way of working that even the most extreme business-continuity plans hadn’t envisioned. Across industries, leaders will use the lessons from this large-scale work-from-home experiment to reimagine how work is done—and what role offices should play—in creative and bold ways.

The key differentiator will be ensuring that your employees are excited, enabled and safe to get back to work. Now is the time to reimagine your office, and it starts with focusing on how to create a great in-office employee experience.

Safety

Safety is going to be of utmost important factor for employees to return to work.  We have all seen difficult times in last over 18 months and have even lost our near and dear one’s. Aspect of safety at workplace both while commuting or in office will have to be addressed by these organizations in order to bring back their employees.  There are organisations who are working on RTO Planning keeping in mind the guidelines from authorities with the right kind of automation in place to ensure safety and security of its employees.

Additionally, there is focus on wellness programmes now's with the increased focus. Not only do employees want to know their organization cares about their wellness, but many are trying to process a difficult year filled with loss and uncertainty as well.

Overall Hygiene and office layouts

Office layouts and set-ups have evolved over last few years with the help of technology and organisations will need to work further more on this aspect to welcome their employees back and make a comfortable living work culture

Flexibility

Qualtrics reports that having a sense of belonging is the biggest factor in engagement, ahead of things like trustworthy leadership and career growth. Being excited to return to the office also means that they feel like their needs are being heard, and that their organization cares for them. Allowing teams to have a flexible work schedule, if that's valuable to them. Having a little fun and adding some gamification into your productivity goals doesn't hurt either.

Office Commute

Office commute accounts for probably the 3rd largest spend for a large enterprise and highly sensitive from the safety point of view as an employee spends close 20% of his time working hours in day, only in commuting.  Stressful commute leads to productivity loss.

Besides all precautions and distancing norms, an enterprise shall be expected to take the commute to the next level to meet employee’s expectations its been long that employees have been commuting to office hence would be very apprehensive to move out of their WFH zones.  This facility will also be required to be looked at differently keeping in mind the hybrid model with distancing norms in place.  This will demand with strong technology based efficient solutions in order to keep the costs in control.