Every company has its own culture; that is, the relationship between the company and employees, and the relationships employees have with each other. This culture tends to evolve top down — from how executive management engages with their lieutenants – and ultimately how managers and peers extend that dynamic through the organization over time.
Usually, this culture harmonizes with the nature of the company’s business. You will hear of a “safety culture” or a “service culture” or a “creative culture.” Unlike social cultures which exist solely to foster a sense of belonging, company cultures seek to get everyone contributing freely to business goals in line with the expectations of management and customers.
With the adoption of remote employees performing remote work, extending a company culture to embrace and motivate remote staff has become a new management challenge. Fortunately, it’s a challenge that is easily met. When done right, a remote work culture can provide the job satisfaction and increased productivity that remote work seeks to achieve from a geographically distributed team.
Steps To Building a Solid Remote Work Culture
Unlike a company culture that may have evolved organically from the center of the company at its founding, a remote work culture needs to be cultivated, consciously and systematically. There is simply no way a remote employee can “get a feeling for the place” if they are not physically at the place.
1. Building the Foundations
Core Values
Every company has certain core values, but not every company articulates them. In order to share and cultivate these values with remote employees, they need to be explicit. This is a good exercise for any company, and a critical one for remote staff.
Beyond just writing them down, engage with personnel in ways that assure alignment with those values. For remote employees, that might mean conducting verifiable values training with an informal QA soon after. Connecting a remote worker with an onsite buddy can help connect them to the company. Formally recognizing when employees demonstrate company values – especially remote workers – reminds all staff of the importance of those values.
Communication Strategies
Regular, clear, and consistent communications is critical for engaging remote staff. Interaction with remote employees should go beyond the strictly functional and transactional. Make sure you’re setting aside time for them to “hang” with the rest of the team and connect at a personal level with managers and cohorts.
This may rely on tools like video conferencing, team chats, instant messaging, and project management platforms. Set a schedule for these engagements over and above ordinary working sessions so remote staff can gain a sense of how the team dynamic works and the norms of participation.
Collaboration Tools
The same tools used for managing workflows can also help nurture company culture. Applications and platforms for functions like file sharing, task management, and brainstorming screenshare software allow remote staff to contribute in much the same way as onsite employees. Remote workers will feel like full team members, and that influences how they feel about the company.
2. Fostering Connection and Engagement
Onboarding Remote Employees
A deliberate connection with the company should start even before a new employee’s first day of work. A comprehensive onboarding process for all new hires, especially remote ones, should include pre-start swag – like a company T-shirt or coffee mug – delivered to their home.
The actual onboarding should engage as many different employees and departments as possible. This will give remote workers a sense of belonging to something much larger, even if they’ll rarely work directly with those folks. Those people with whom they will be working should get extended introductions with a bit of “quality time” to help develop personal relationships.
Promoting Team Building
Good company culture of any kind should include non-work-related social events. This becomes even more important when remote teams are involved. Virtual team-building activities like online lunch-and-learn workshops (with meals delivered to remote staff), networked games, and other remote social activities can be even more engaging than in-person events, with everyone encouraged to participate no matter how shy they might be.
Recognition and Appreciation
Achievements by team members should be routinely honored in any good organization. When remote employees are a part of the organization, that recognition should be delivered in a way the remote staff can share.
One word of caution: If the honoree is remote, the fact that they’re remote should not be part of the acknowledgement. Never call out the fact their status is somehow different from any of their colleagues.
3. Leading Remote Teams
Setting Clear Expectations
Even though you want your remote employees to feel fully part of the team, there may be certain ways in which they simply are not. Living in a time zone different from the main office is an obvious such case. This might affect deadlines for delivering work or attendance at meetings. In such cases, the ground rules should be set at the very beginning and everyone affected should be aware of them.
Likewise, if someone is working from home because they have childcare or eldercare responsibilities, everyone should understand and respect such considerations. Regardless of the company’s culture, this demonstrates a caring organization and will boost the spirits of all employees.
Performance Management
With clear expectations set, performance management and continuous feedback can apply according to company policy. But know: Feedback carries a lot more weight with a remote employee. Without continuous daily non-verbal cues to communicate the company’s opinion of their performance, remote workers can grow anxious and stressed. Managers should take extra steps to touch base with remote staff and acknowledge all contributions.
If the circumstances of the employee’s remote status might affect their performance – and assuming all parties have agreed – that should be made explicit in goal-setting for their work and the corresponding evaluations.
Managing Cross-Cultural Teams
Regardless of company culture, every employee comes with a cultural heritage of their own. In the case of remote staff working internationally, that might include different national holidays and other observances. Think of this as a natural extension of respect for cultural differences of any kind in the workplace.
This mindset enables the company and its management to seek and recognize ways to promote their unique company culture to a range of individuals. This, in turn, makes the workplace a welcoming environment for the most talented people available, regardless of where in the world they live.
A Remote Dream Team With Culture as the Cornerstone
The reason any company brings on remote personnel is because those people will do the best job of executing the company’s mission and helping achieve its goals. This is the same reason a company cultivates a specific culture and makes efforts to infuse their staff with it.
By extending that culture to remote employees, the company can get the maximum value of each employee’s contributions. That increases each employee’s job satisfaction while improving the bottom line.
About Solvo:
Solvo drives business growth by connecting North American companies with exceptional remote workers and AI-powered tools. Our unique nearshoring model ensures efficient collaboration in the same time zone, reducing turnover, and driving cost efficiencies. With a focus on fostering a great work environment, Solvo is dedicated to attracting top talent, ensuring our partners never have to choose between cost and quality.
