16 Practical Ways To Build A Strong Culture With A Remote Tech Team

Take the time to create or revisit your company values while working remotely. Then, use a recognition tool like Nectar to share those values and make them a part of your team’s vision. When you first switch to a remote communication environment, it can be challenging to understand when communication happens. Therefore, your organization should establish that you are moving to a more asynchronous communication style.

Based on my experiences making remote work work, here are a few steps companies can take to shore up the work culture in a remote workplace. Stay intentional and aim for a genuine approach before you decide to go towards one particular direction. A fake remote culture won’t get you the buy-in you’re looking for as opposed to displaying a fresh image that doesn’t simply repeat a boring list of values everyone is trying to stick to. Zappos builds company-worker trust by allowing its employees to self-manage their work by getting limited supervision that allows them to showcase their full creativity at their own pace.

Also, make appearances in virtual team building events, meetings, instant messaging threads, as well as one-on-one social activities such as virtual coffee breaks. Leader attendance and involvement encourages other staff to participate. Plus, cultivating a consistent online presence builds a stronger connection between you and employees, and breeds a sense of loyalty. Setting and maintaining a company culture is important for any business. However, doing this in a remote work environment can pose unique challenges. Fortunately, there are some simple ways leaders of remote teams can develop and preserve a strong company culture.

Communicating values and reasonings behind decisions engages employees more than doling out updates or orders. Booking virtual team building events gives employees the chance for face-to-face time with coworkers, allowing opportunities to bond and socialize online outside of working hours. Remote company culture is vital for your company’s success, but it can be challenging to implement. To ensure you get off on the right foot, consider what kind of culture would best suit your remote employees and be intentional in all your actions. It is essential to pay attention to your remote employee experience, especially during uncertain economic times. Collaborative tools are some of the building blocks of company culture, because they create transparency and accountability without managers having to micromanage.

Culture is about how you work

So, we asked a panel of Forbes Coaches Council members to share their top strategies for building company culture and improving morale in an all-remote team. Embed recognition in the company culture by making it fundamental to the core values of your company. Make praise a daily habit, and set aside designated times and events to highlight and make it memorable. When building a culture with a remote team, knowing the company’s purpose, values, and goals is essential.

Having such set values helps you choose the right team members from the very beginning and ensure lower turnover rates in the long run. Not to mention that happy employees contribute to the brand’s promotion attempts and help bring in new team members. Having a well-established workplace culture implies setting a list of values and opinions that all employees can agree with and later promote themselves. Companies can use pulse surveys to complement their annual engagement survey. They are a great way to gather real-time feedback and measure how employees respond to organizational changes.

Ways Tech Leaders Can Build A Strong Culture In A Remote Team

Good remote team culture is imposed from the first contact a new hire gets with the company. That’s why it’s easier to choose new team members who are a fit for your work culture from the start rather than forcing values onto a person who can’t accept them. Finding out if an employee is pleased with the level of recognition they receive is more difficult than getting any other type of insights in the absence of an anonymous employee engagement survey. You can then turn to your team to showcase your mission publicly, turning your company into a top-of-mind example of great work culture. When working within an office setting, it’s much easier to acquire these values.

With a distributed team you know going in that culture will be hard to build. When you are team building online, you don’t delude yourself thinking that culture will magically happen. If a strong culture doesn’t develop it’s not because you didn’t try, it’s usually due to another reason. Basically, don’t build a remote team just to save a few bucks and fatten the bottom line. Treat your remote team like you would an in-office team, and your company culture will benefit long term. 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 building team spirit, not only should you tell them how important they are in delivering a project, but you should also find ways to connect with them personally. Send lunch to their homes, or present them with a coffee gift card or something they were not expecting. Book a time to meet socially online to enjoy lunch or coffee together as a group to build bonds in the absence of being physically together. Read on for expert advice from the members of Forbes Business Council. As remote teams get more popular, I expect we’ll hear more about the cultures in remote teams and how they develop differently from co-located teams. Pair Buddies are a weekly random pairing with 2-3 people on the team that allows you to catch up on work, life, or anything else.

Create A Regular Appreciation Cadence

Pair buddy chats help keep some semblance of the office social life as part of work and encourage people who work in different departments to get to know each other better. Those decisions and values create culture in remote companies more than a ping pong table would because our work is our lifeblood. With co-located teams, it’s easy to ignore culture building with the expectation that it will naturally happen. In 99% of situations (made up number), this is simply not true, but by the time a co-located team realizes it, it might be too late to repair their culture.

Patagonia rewards their employees daily by prioritizing their wellness and encouraging them to take time off whenever needed. These two communication methods do wonders in a remote setting like never before. Extra touches such as hosting team socials and icebreaker activities, mailing a welcome care package, and adding the new employee bio to the website can also create a lasting positive impression. Harvard Business Review includes additional tips on how to make remote communication work here.

The money that you save by not spending on office space and utilities for your employees? Put that aside and use it to sponsor in-person meet-ups at least once a year. Be willing to spend to bring everyone together for team-building, whether to attend a conference or a company getaway.

Psychological safety is a sense of trust and confidence in the workplace. Psychological safety underpins all DEI efforts and ensures possible precise https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ and honest communication. It can be easy to feel separated when you can’t see what other people are working on or work together effortlessly.

To reap the benefits of working remotely, a company needs to integrate remote work throughout its operations and within its work culture. While this can be done in different ways, async work, the right to disconnect, fair policies and remote leadership should all be part of the equation. Working remotely is becoming more and more common among today’s professionals. The convenience of being able to work from anywhere allows for more flexibility, greater work-life balance and can even increase productivity. However, when employees are so physically and geographically spread out, it becomes even more difficult to create a sense of camaraderie and teamwork. In this guide, we’ll have an up-close look at how you can handle the challenges of working remotely to ensure a lasting remote team culture while making sure no one is left out of the picture.

• Telecommuters can run errands or perform chores in between meetings, or can log on during early mornings or late evenings.
• Despite managers obsessing over keeping things in real-time, it’s just not possible to bring in team members from different time zones to work for the same 8-hour time span.
• Maybe you were one of the first companies to rely solely on asynchronous communication or you have a one-of-a-kind cause you’re already contributing too to some extent.
• Turn to your team for help to start developing trust as a foundation for your workplace culture.
• Psychological safety is essential for remote teams because it helps with communication, collaboration, and accountability.

Try a tool like Krisp to remove both your and their background chatter and ensure the clarity of all meetings. Every team is different and a company’s values are often singular with no other model to simply mimic. In traditional offices, there are more organic opportunities for coworkers to interact and bond. In-office colleagues can chat over coffee in the breakroom, say hi to each other in the halls, or meetup at the corner bar after work for happy hours, to name a few options. One of the biggest indicators of a good work culture is positive performance.