According to Gallup, between 2019 and 2023, approximately 40% of employees who could feasibly complete their jobs remotely went from working entirely onsite to having hybrid or remote work arrangements. This cultural movement was spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns. Beginning in earnest in March of 2020, these lockdowns forced a fundamental re-evaluation of the industrialized workforce not just upon businesses but upon the workers themselves. Giving workers the chance to step back and assess the kinds of work they were doing and the rote, mechanized, highly confined ways in which they were doing that work, incited a great deal of evolution and innovation within numerous fields.
Since the pandemic, many companies have taken these changes to heart and implemented them into their everyday routines and protocols. With employees realizing that working doesn’t necessarily have to mean being on location while completing the work, many have spread out across different locations. This adaptation has driven a need for companies and businesses to establish a sense of consistency, cohesion, and belonging that brings everyone together.
The Role of Culture in a Distributed Workforce
Culture is an important connector, and now more than ever. At Fortive—which spans 50-plus countries—their team relies on a unique set of practices and enabling tools called the Fortive Business System. With a continuous improvement mindset to unite us, they have fostered a strong, learning-focused culture across all offices.
Organizational culture is how you can drive improvement, develop people, and show up every day to support each other. When you provide your teams with the right values, tool sets, vocabulary, and commitments, you can have an outsized impact no matter where employees are located.
There are endless approaches to bringing culture to life, but one common way is adopting the Japanese business philosophy of kaizen. It’s an organizational belief rooted in continuous improvement, with a strong emphasis on customer centricity. Many American businesspeople were introduced to kaizen because it was a core component of Toyota’s operational approach, the “Toyota way.”
Embracing Kaizen: Continuous Improvement in a Modern Workplace
Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning change for the better or continuous improvement. It is a Japanese business philosophy regarding the processes that continuously improve operations and involve all employees. Kaizen sees improvement in productivity as a gradual and methodical process.
Fortive’s former parent company, Danaher, adopted this philosophy, and they chose to retain it after becoming an independent company. The focus on growth, empowerment, quality, and efficiency helped unify their team during that period of change, and the prioritization of customer satisfaction ensured attention remained in the right place.
While kaizen is a proven way to drive efficiency, Fortive’s team has made it their own with a focus on four pillars: inclusion, humility, high expectations, and transparency. Doing so helped shape their unique employee value proposition to help employees do their best work within the context of the company and the industries it spans.
When establishing or transforming company culture, it is critical to begin by considering what is and isn’t currently working, then dig into the “why.” Have conversations broadly across the organization, not just with executives or senior leaders. Then, use what you learn from those discussions to shape your approach.
Before 2020, workers showed up in the office to complete their work because that was what had always been done. However, following COVID lockdowns, employees and employers alike could take stock of how the world had changed around their workforces and more appropriately see ways in which these industries could evolve. In a world where entire teams can connect online, have immediate conversations, and provide feedback from different continents, remote work has become part of the new normal that is here to stay.
