Ways To Build A Strong Remote Team Culture

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This practice establishes trust and respect and creates a positive work environment where everyone can thrive. If your employees are working from home, for the long term or temporarily, you need to take steps to build a strong remote team culture that leads to happier, more engaged employees. Buffer’s State of Remote Work Survey established “loneliness” as the second biggest struggle with working remotely. A strong remote work culture unites workers around a shared sense of purpose. This produces feelings of camaraderie and also leads to real actions—such as casual check-ins—that counteract isolation.

Many leaders struggle with the idea that the only way to build culture is to physically see it. It’s much more complex to define work culture in the virtual world. Yet it just never seemed like it was working out.” As a result, her company lost a true high performer. Our company implements something akin to this during the onboarding stage.

Some Of Your Team Members Like Physical Gifts

If you want a way to automate recognition and make it easier for everyone on your team to give each other props and gratitude, use Nectar’s recognition tool. Our tool makes it easy for your team to share the love at work while giving you access to some powerful analytics to help increase participation and get insight into future company leaders. When was the last time you took a look at your company’s org chart? After establishing your communication rules, you want to look into communication methods.

Adding beloved traditions to an already strong culture can make employees feel like fulfilled members of a tight-knit community. Create a calendar (for the year or at least a quarter) filled with all-hands meetings, town-halls, virtual events, and other gatherings. This gives employees working from home a firm sense of time and connection to other employees.

Tools & Ideas To Help You Build A Strong Remote Work Culture

So we recognized that it was important for our people to realize — and feel like — they were part of something more than whatever was going on within the four walls of their own home offices. Measuring engagement and happiness is an important part of defining and maintaining culture in a company, and remote teams are no exception. When it comes to getting work done, a bevy of collaboration tools are now available to help you stay on top of what everyone is working on. Trello and Confluence, for example, are two project management and content creation tools made by Atlassian that help remote teams work together, track project progress, and meet deadlines.

Without visible body language or immediate reassurance from teammates and managers, doubt can set in and remote workers second guess themselves. However, shouting out a job well done assures team members of a satisfactory performance and the team’s regard. It’s nearly impossible to maintain a strong remote work culture when teams are constantly losing members to attrition. And while many leaders view turnover as an inevitability of the labor market, they must recognize their role in creating a virtual work culture that makes people want to stay. Additionally, navigating change means leaders seeking input from their teams.

Why Company Culture Matters

A regular schedule of informal catch-ups are a great chance for team-building because it replicates the conversations people would have on their coffee breaks. You want to build trust with your staff that you don’t have tough conversations over DM, but you also don’t have endless meetings without a goal. Set your communication policy accordingly and make sure everyone follows it. Understand how remote work could be impacting employee engagement in your organization by downloading our research, 2020 Employee Engagement Trends Report. A good onboarding process helps you start new hires on a positive note so they join the team excited and ready to contribute with confidence. Team leaders get support to help them adapt to managing colleagues who work in different locations.

The idea of an open-door policy is not good enough in the virtual world. They put responsibility on your team members to know how, when, and to what extent to leverage you as their leader. In reality, the link between being in the office and employee productivity how to build culture in a remote team is tenuous at best. Many employees report that at home, absent from frequent interruptions and an hour or more lost to commuting—they get more done. One of the chief concerns with remote work is that it can negatively affect employee well-being.

The best part of Slack is that our water cooler discussions are always accessible. And there’s no “behind-your-back politics” that happens in many co-located offices. SnackNation is a healthy office snack delivery service that makes healthy snacking fun, life more productive, and workplaces awesome. SnackNation employees have moved their beloved “Crush-It” call to a remote format that actually enhances certain aspects of the event. As employees share their “crush” (a colleague they want to recognize for outstanding work), everyone else can buzz and bond via online chat without interrupting their peers.

• The event planning experts at the Go Game will set up virtual game shows, happy hours, and conferences that help your team members bond from any location.
• The convenience of being able to work from anywhere allows for more flexibility, greater work-life balance and can even increase productivity.
• We do this by sharing weekly updates on our internal blog (Async) every Friday—I bet you can imagine how it would feel to be the only one with nothing to show.
• But it’s not just employees who care about culture—employers know that the right work culture means engaged and more productive employees.
• As important as workplace collaboration and communication tools are, technology alone can’t keep remote workers engaged with business objectives.

Take steps to normalize valuing one another’s personal priorities, such as sharing why you’re blocking off time on your calendar and not bugging your teammates when they’re signed off. Look for opportunities to cut down on the time your employees are required to be together—whether that’s adjusting your working hours or reducing unnecessary meetings. Because we don’t overdo meetings or insist on too much forced team time, people actually look forward to coming together. Getting a remote team perspective on how your company runs, especially if you are not 100% remote, will be very productive to how you continue running your business.

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