Culture takes more to foster a connection between a company and its employees. It takes mindfulness, intention, and rethinking how your employees work together. How do great distributed teams cultivate a winning culture?
Company culture is important because it affects how your employees and customers perceive you—and this greatly determines how successful your business will be. When a company lives up to its core values, its culture will transform employees into advocates, enrich their wellbeing, and ensure the company retains its top talent.
In a remote or distributed team, it’s easy for people to feel like they need to respond to requests immediately to show that they are staying actively engaged. However, it’s important to agree on that everyone has space to carve out time for meaningful work that requires uninterrupted attention. It’s important to create boundaries within remote teams. You can agree together how to do it: time blocks on the calendar, status settings on Slack or a full weekday with no meetings.
Different people across the organization may have different ideas about what a flexible working situation entails. Have a dialog with your team to assess needs, expectations, and what’s reasonable. Additionally, studies have shown that teams that are more emotionally connected, and engaged work more effectively together. Be sure to set a clear process for collaboration and communication.
Meeting face to face is also important for relationship building. If you can, leverage offices to bring teams together during onboarding. Or, you can schedule regular in-person team off-sites or summit meetings.
Collecting feedback regularly to make adjustments by asking each remote employee to pay close attention to the process and tell you what worked and what didn’t. This will allow you to continuously improve the process for your future hires.
Building a remote culture requires a more concerted effort than in the office. You need to have a specific vision for your culture and create it through your hiring decisions, the goals you set, and the way that your team communicates.