Guide to Building a Remote Work Culture with Virtual Teams

When the environment is stable and supportive, a successful team culture will emerge. Measure engagement with tools that can garner feedback anonymously, such as TINYPulse, so employees feel empowered to truly speak their minds. You can also invite feedback in a public setting, such as an all-hands meeting, and encourage honest feedback on the direction of the company or how work gets done. Measuring engagement and happiness is an important part of defining and maintaining culture in a company, and remote teams are no exception.

Company culture can seem like something that’s reserved only for big companies with robust HR teams and hefty company event budgets. But I’ve come to believe that it’s critical to invest in culture no matter what your team size—especially if you’re working remotely. If your corporate culture isn’t well-defined yet, take the time to think about what you’d like it to look like. Effectively building a remote company culture requires a goal and a plan. Once those are in place, you can decide what your next steps should be. Successfully navigating a positive virtual work environment by working on your team culture can increase productivity – a tradeoff that’s well worth the time spent.

Be careful not to box people into stereotypes since, of course, not everyone from a country will act the same. Still, understanding some hallmarks of employees’ national cultures may prevent some misunderstandings and help you appreciate their differences. Just as caring ranked high across regions, authority consistently ranked low across regions, making it one of the least common company culture attributes. An authoritative corporate culture stresses competition and powerful features like self-confidence, decisiveness, and boldness. While this mentality is more common in some countries than others, it’s not generally a dominant aspect of corporate cultures today, according to employees in the survey.

Going global has become an increasingly popular strategy for companies hoping to take advantage of all the benefits a global remote workforce can offer. While expanding internationally can propel your business forward, this move has some important implications for organizational cultures. If they’re difficult to learn and use, or they have frequent glitches, employees will struggle to stay engaged or productive. You could also introduce gamification and incentives to boost engagement.

Pay extra attention to training

You can create personal publications and personality tests to make the members comfortable and familiar with each other. Every person has their unique and individual idea of how remote work is necessary and how it is accomplished. You can also discuss with the team their opportunities to access the beliefs, requirements, and understanding of what is reasonable. With remote working, companies also recruited talents from all across the globe to get more exposure. Though it started with a lot of chaos and uncertainty regarding productivity, employers eventually saw that remote working does not affect productivity or the quality of work.

Plan company events with a purpose beyond just spending time together, such as an activity you can do together or an interesting prompt to get people talking. Whether you’re a leader or an employee looking to improve the workplace for all, here are four simple steps to consider. Ask managers to rate employees’ embodiment of cultural values during annual reviews. Regular contact with even just one trusted friend or mentor can do wonders for a remote employee’s sense of belonging. Create a survey that employees can use to provide feedback on your policies and ask questions.

Employees will feel a sense of connection to coworkers and the company mission, despite not sharing a physical workspace. Happy employees form friendships with coworkers and share positive sentiments about the company. Signs of a healthy virtual office may include active Slack channels and good attendance at virtual team outings. Consider how you’ll communicate how to build culture in a remote team with employees, and which tools and channels you’ll use to provide information. Growing your business is probably at the top of your to-do list, but it’s impossible to grow without reliable, hard-working employees. While building culture in remote teams can be challenging, a strong corporate culture will improve your relationship with your employees.

INSPIRING ENGAGEMENT

You can also conduct “out-of-the-work” interactive sessions to help team members understand each other’s beliefs and points of view. It will also help create personal and emotional bonds within the team that will eventually help them work effectively. It is essential to acknowledge that employees participate in the meetings to be present. Therefore, develop a culture of conducting meetings with purpose and avoiding them for every minor issue or occasion.

How to make socializing feasible among remote workers, mainly when they are scattered across the globe? The best way to resolve this concern is to conduct virtual events for the employees. For a team transitioning to working remotely, it can be hard to lose that personal contact and water cooler chat that helps create work culture. It would be wise to set up regular team calls for work related issues and projects, but also virtual catchups where the team can talk about non-work related matters.

In-person experiences or physical gifts can dispel the fear of missing out on the perks of a more traditional office setting. Holding a mix of structured and unstructured activities varying between large groups and small groups suits the needs of a wide range of employees. Introverts may prefer intimate, one-on-one interactions, while extroverts crave the energy of a big turnout. Some employees may prefer to focus during the day and socialize off the clock, while those with more delicate work life balances are grateful for workday interactions. Also, mixing up the program and catering to different interests attracts a larger audience. 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.

Steps & Ideas For Building A Strong Remote Work Culture In Virtual Teams

Put your remote and hybrid workers through the same rigorous hiring standards you would anyone else. Hire a balanced team consisting of people of different upbringings, experiences, and ages, in order to bring a wide array of viewpoints to the table. For a remote team, hire people who are autonomous, independent, and have strong collaboration skills.

To build your remote team with our talented team of virtual assistants, click here to schedule a free consultation with Wishup today. 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. Also encourage remote workers to work without distractions for blocks of time each day – even if that means turning off certain communication channels – and to take breaks as needed.

You get to focus on managing your employees and building and reinforcing your company culture to help your whole team succeed. Your remote culture and policies have to be ready to adapt to changes, and that includes using feedback from employees! In a transparent organization, feedback is positively encouraged, and all staff should feel comfortable expressing concerns or suggestions.

Collaboration

The similarities we see across cultures in international businesses could be due in part to how interconnected our world has become. Cultural differences that may have once been stark between countries have become more subtle with globalization. There are still certainly cultural differences in business practices across the world, but you’ll often find more similarities between employees than differences, regardless of how far apart they live.

• Developing a strong remote culture will take hard work from everyone involved, and you need buy-in at all levels to make it work.
• Cultural differences that may have once been stark between countries have become more subtle with globalization.
• When work is engaging and rewarding, it can be one of our favorite and most recharging ways to engage in life.
• We mentioned the importance of choosing tools that work with your remote culture.
• A good project management tool like Asana or Trello is great for keeping all your projects and tasks organized.
• This could include activities like a scavenger hunt, virtual Pictionary or even an online talent show.

With RemotePass services, onboarding and payroll for our global team is well managed and our employees feel safe and cared for. RemotePass has been so efficient for us as we have at least 60% of our team being remote. Especially for tracking if everyone has been paid out or if they have reimbursements, we don’t have to manually do it one by one anymore. It’s also really good since we are in compliance with each and every single one of our remote teams’ place of residence. Communication and collaboration are essential for a team to accomplish its goals. Maximize collaboration tools and strategies so people can work well together even in a dispersed workplace.

How do you create a strong remote work culture?

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. For marketing and design teams, it’s also helpful if managers and project managers can create and assign tasks easily, and communicate these to the employees. A good project management tool like Asana or Trello is great for keeping all your projects and tasks organized. This should go without saying, but in order to build trust, it’s important to make sure your remote employees feel like they belong, no matter their race, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

Pros of remote work culture

Knowing that a manager is only a message away makes employees feel safer and closer to leaders. When you build trust, you already have the foundation of a psychologically safe environment. It turns out that when it comes to building a strong culture with a remote tech team, the challenge isn’t necessarily what to do, but how to do it. Below, 16 members of Forbes Technology Council share practical ways a tech leader can build a strong culture with a tech team that works exclusively remotely. In 2020, many companies that were forced to try out remote work arrangements did so with trepidation, worrying that productivity would drop and employee engagement would suffer.

Overall the system is excellent, and I would recommend it to other organizations. Appoint someone as the new hire’s role buddy who will support them, answer all their questions, and proactively reach out to them to create a connection between the new hire and everyone on the team. Are already using one-on-one meetings to discuss growth and development opportunities. These two communication methods do wonders in a remote setting like never before. Keep employees more engaged and prevent frequent errors on tasks that would otherwise result from poor communication. Krisp to remove both your and their background chatter and ensure the clarity of all meetings.

The 6-point roadmap to building a strong remote team culture

While you do not need to be on-call 24/7, make a point to be online and reachable at least a couple of hours a day. Designate regular “office hours,” or updating your status on platforms like Slack. Consider tag-teaming with other leaders so that there is always a manager online, and establish https://globalcloudteam.com/ a chain of command so staff have a backup option if one party is unreachable. Working from home requires self-direction and self-determination, so grant your remote staff autonomy. If your workers need to wait for further instructions, then your team may lose time and motivation.

How To Build A Strong Culture With A Remote Team: 8 Ideas

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. A career development plan is a written roadmap for short and long-term goals that team members set for themselves and work on to achieve career goals.