As we move past the early reactive response period to the coronavirus pandemic, companies eager to shift into recovery mode first need to stop and ask one critical question: "What does this mean for our employees?" 

Despite being on my current team for a year and a half, I’ve never felt closer to my colleagues until the last few months. Previously, I was the lone remote worker. Today, everyone is working remote due to COVID-19, which evens the playing field in terms of team building activities.

Companies around the globe are feeling the impact of COVID-19 and are instructing their employees to work from home or even laying off part of their staff. As schools are closing, some through the end of the school year, many remote employees will have to parent their children and support their education as best they can. (Here are some educational resources for working parents during this time).

Creating a great culture starts with collecting all the underlying whys.

HR professionals today are more than familiar with the concept of corporate or organizational culture. You wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t. Executives openly ask if they have the right culture in place to meet their goals. Merger and acquisition analysts spend countless hours looking at how a new purchase will affect the corporate culture. A Google search for “organizational culture” brings back 12 million hits. Type in “corporate culture” and you get 48 million.  

“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” — Zig Ziglar

It’s common to “take stock” of our personal and professional goals. We may take the time to evaluate how we performed against our own goals or resolutions, year-end reports and performance reviews can evaluate how we performed against professional goals, and we can evaluate our programs, vendors, and customer/client experiences as a way to measure progress against organizational goals

We have overcome so many challenges in addressing employee engagement. Time was, HR and engagement leaders had to convince the organization of the importance of investing in rewards and recognition, then engagement — and today, holistic solutions have appeared from the possibilities of technological advancement to bring engagement, wellness, rewards, and so many other aspects of workforce management together in one unified platform. It’s a different time.

10 guaranteed, foolproof, effortless ways to take care of your employee engagement and company culture once and for all. Or not.

Maritz Motivation was once again honored as the giant category winner of St. Louis Business Journal’s “Best Place to Work” Award. Today we are highlighting one of our employees, Leah Harwell, who helps make the culture so special.