5 Steps To Building Corporate Culture For Remote Teams

One of the cons of remote work, especially with teams distributed across time zones, is employees often feel more pressure to be “always on,” which can lead to overworking. Remote and hybrid workers are more likely than on-site ones to work over 50 hours per week. Support your employees in setting boundaries by creating a remote work culture that encourages them to “shut off” and prioritize their personal lives for a healthier work-life balance. The single best study on a great remote team culture was conducted a couple of years ago before all of the madness and the forced work-from-home experiment that many of us had to partake in started. It was conducted on virtual teams from multinational organizations that were also cross-functional teams. These were the most boundaryless of the boundaryless teams meeting virtually, most on video calls and collaborating asynchronously, because they were all over the world.

how to build culture in a remote team

InVision has been lauded for offering an outstanding work/life balance, having increased employee happiness, and having a stellar CEO leading the team. In addition, they offer great perks and benefits like a peer recognition budget, family caregiving support, annual self-development funds, and charitable donation matching. Do you want some inspiration as you consider how to improve your remote corporate culture? Here are three companies that are well-known for their remote culture, so you can look at some of the benefits, perks, and experiences they offer their remote team members. Another way to align as a team while remote is to take some time to revisit company goals and targets as a team. Transparency at work is essential to creating a group of people who trust you and your leadership moves.

Use More Video

Again, the nice thing about Dialpad is that we don’t just have to call or have video meetings with people. We can send them messages too with the understanding that they’ll get to it when they can. Decide which communication channels should be used for which purposes.

In #proud-moments, we share encouraging messages and compliments that we receive from our customers. In #kudos, team members can show gratitude to each other—because of their help, their accomplishment or just because. The key is to find ways for people to connect and engage, especially those that aren’t working in the same department and therefore don’t need to communicate per se.

We love Slack for all communication, both private and group conversations. You can pin messages, style text to highlight important parts, and easily search for documents and content. We have work channels for different teams and projects, as well as fun channels for casual water cooler chit-chats. Having informal channels for friendly, off-topic conversations makes for a balanced, healthy work environment. As part of the onboarding process at The Remote Company, we introduce new team members on Slack by sharing 3 of their top interests and a fun fact about them.

how to build culture in a remote team

You could hold a video call with everyone, but this might intimidate introverted new hires. So you may want to send out a questionnaire for them to fill out and share with the team instead. Many companies now publicize their company culture slide decks, such as the image above from HubSpot’s Culture Code, if you need a bit of inspiration here. Your company culture is like a compass your team will follow, steering them in the right direction and influencing all their decisions. It provides them with a framework for working, communicating, and collaborating as a unit no matter where they clock in.

Remote Teams Succeed By Focusing On Culture

Especially in a small team where everyone works closely together, having a connection makes it much easier to work together effectively. Giving everyone a voice and making sure everyone feels comfortable to share their opinions and ideas means there will be a lot more different viewpoints and opinions to take into account. Once your team is on board with the company’s vision and where it is going, it is important to communicate values as well. We are experts in virtual facilitation and can help you design and facilitate your virtual meeting, workshop, or summit. Reach out for a complimentary 30 min virtual work coaching session.

  • Virtual employees aren’t greeted by a chorus of “good mornings” upon entering the office.
  • Company-wide, staff talk regularly about assuming “mistake rather than malice,” which means that employees start with the assumption that someone did their best and tried to do the right thing.
  • Our team leaders also share their gratitude during monthly feedback video calls.
  • By encouraging accountability, you’re ensuring everyone can succeed and get projects to the finish line.
  • To grow a strong remote team that can collaborate effectively, ensure that every team member knows their role and responsibilities.

Consider how you’ll communicate with employees, and which tools and channels you’ll use to provide information. By implementing these suggestions while managing a virtual team, you can transform a group of how to build culture in a remote team remote employees into an organizational powerhouse that runs on company culture. Although perhaps counterintuitive, virtual teams and rich company culture are not necessarily at odds with one another.

Warning: Avoid death By Meeting

Unfortunately, it’s easy for remote workers to feel isolated and burned out from working long hours. “One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give is to always make time for one-on-one meetings with your team members,” shares CJ Bachmann, CEO of 1SEO Digital Agency. “Staying consistent with meeting with your team personally allows the lines of communication to stay open and ensures everyone feels heard.” Creating a robust organizational culture in a remote environment has been difficult for many teams.

how to build culture in a remote team

While we don’t encourage the use of emojis or gifs as primary forms of communication , we do encourage their use as an emotional form of communication . Over time, an established team might develop custom emojis to express memes or shared inside jokes. These bond the team and grow into artifacts that make up your team culture. In the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic and its economic aftermath, many people around the world began working from home, more so than ever before.

Since the pandemic, this number has boomed, and many organizations are deciding to stay remote. If you’ve been around these last few years, you know how challenging it is to create a strong company culture while remote. We’ve written plenty about creating and building your company culture in general. In this article, let’s dig deeper into practical ways to build and grow a positive company culture with a remote team. Your remote culture and policies have to be ready to adapt to changes, and that includes using feedback from employees!

During the first few minutes, everyone is on video getting settled in. Meanwhile, Sutton makes a point to say hello to different team members, mostly individuals whom she otherwise wouldn’t interact with much on a daily basis. Those small but significant interactions are an important part of strengthening the underlying fabric of a remote team. One of the things we’ve been particularly focused on during that time, and perhaps even more so during the pandemic, is remote company culture. In a “normal” office environment, the “watercooler” is where all the unofficial, off-topic, unrelated chatter happens. In some places it’s seen as a waste of time, but it’s actually an integral part of employees bonding outside work and creating trust between each other.

Have An Intentional Meeting Culture

Not to mention, cultivating a sense of togetherness is tricky when team members are so far apart. However, it is possible to create a strong remote work culture in 2020. Part of the allure of working from home is the freedom to work whenever and wherever. Telecommuters can run errands or perform chores in between meetings, or can log on during early mornings or late evenings. When operating remotely, work times are not dependent on the hours an office building is open, enabling employees to design both the ideal workday and the optimal work environment.

how to build culture in a remote team

One essential component of building a thriving remote culture is showing appreciation for your teammates’ work. As a leader, it’s important to recognize employees through public shoutouts, as well as private channels (such as one-on-one conversations). For many, this comes back to fostering inclusiveness and ensuring the transmission and reinforcement of culture for remote employees. Ensuring inclusiveness might mean changing habits around how and where information is communicated.

Sales LeadersFellow helps Sales leaders run productive 1-on-1s, team meetings, forecasting calls, and coaching sessions. Fellow for EnterpriseSupport company leaders with Fellow’s uniform meeting templates, collaborative one-on-one meetings, and feedback tools. Almost every executive we talked with over the past few months knows that we’re entering a new, untested period.

If it’s something you haven’t done too often, you might not have aced the onboarding process the first time around. So, get feedback from each remote employee about the recruitment process as to what worked and what didn’t. This will help you improve your process for your future remote hires.

The bottom line is that when your team is distributed, it’s just harder to keep track of everyone’s progress, whereabouts, and general accountability. If you have an employee who plans to take a day of personal leave, they’re technically still accountable for working that day until they communicate that to you. If your team has a process set up to notify their manager about leave https://globalcloudteam.com/ dates, they need to go through that process. That way, they’re remaining accountable and communicating their availability to all. Perhaps the greatest strength of remote workforces is their understanding that work and life are not mutually exclusive. And throughout the pandemic, hundreds of millions more professionals have felt that push and pull acutely in their daily lives.

An exhaustive list of tips and ideas on how to improve your digital employee experience for employees who are working from home. Love languages are how we receive love or recognition from others. Some people like words of affirmation, but some members of your team probably appreciate physical gifts more. Using rewards in addition to recognition can help you reach out to a broader number of your employees. What brings you together when everything else is scattered are your companies core values.

Remaining A Team

But the goal is to leverage technology and have the infrastructure in place to enable easy communication. Non-verbal communication plays a major role in professional interactions. When a manager asks for an update or “nudges” their team members for information, doing it in person is much easier. They can soften their message through the tone of their voice or other body language cues. Accountability means accepting responsibility for work being done or even being present in the remote office.

Prioritize Health And Wellness As Part Of Corporate Culture

A strong work culture is crucial for your remote team to perform exceptionally. Making sure that the people in your team build strong bonds with one another is a priority of a leader. The steps that I’ve mentioned in this article will help you create a productive work environment for your remote team while ensuring effective team collaboration. Implement them in your work, and see how your people grow and improve performance.

Having these regular meetings helps share news and encourages motivation amongst the entire team. Much has also been written about the perceived cons of having remote teams. The two most discussed topics here is typically the impact on company culture, and the lack of communication that can occur. Being mindful of this when embarking on a distributed team model is a great first step to avoiding these issues.

Regularly seeing each other not only builds trust but also accountability. Team members are no longer names on a screen when you often engage with them. By holding both to the same standard, you’re focusing on results while also being fair to all. Accountability doesn’t mean you’re inflexible, but it does mean you always clearly tell everyone what you expect. If they can’t meet those expectations, they need to talk about that with you.

Often, fully remote businesses will rent out office spaces like WeWork offices, where employees can occasionally come together for client meetings or projects that require in-person contact. This second suggestion does more to build culture when managing a virtual team than the first, but it also will be downright disastrous if the first isn’t firmly in place. Whether you’re managing a virtual team or a collocated one, make sure employees live by core values.

They put many of their insights on creating a remote culture into their blog, Open, and they have many transparency resources like their transparent salaries page. On top of their thought leadership and salaries, they offer great benefits like a four-day work week, health insurance, a minimum vacation of three weeks, family leave, and a 401 with company match. The number of employees working from home is steadily on the rise.

For remote company cultures to work every day, managers should lead by example every day. It’s easy to get stuck in work mode, especially for managers with multiple big responsibilities. But those small, daily interactions are vital to healthy remote team cultures. Virtual teamwork and meetings are digital by nature, meaning they rely heavily on tools and technology. Having the right digital tools in place, and ensuring your team has access and knows how to use them, is foundational in building a strong culture, especially with a remote team.

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