Corporate Culture for Remote Employees
Tags: Remote Working, HR, Hr Strategy, Workforce Development, Employee Culture

Corporate Culture for Remote Employees

It is challenging enough for a company to live their culture every day. With a distributed workforce it can become unmanageable. Yunta Dec 9, 2020·3 min read

Many companies define their values, mission and culture. They probably hang a few posters around the office to remind everyone that the company has values, buy a foosball table, celebrate birthdays at the office, drinks on Friday afternoon, and so on. That’s not too hard or demanding for the team, and HR can tick those boxes off their agenda.

Few companies have a specific mission, live their culture every day, and have values that represent the foundation of the organisation. This demands resources (time, lot of time), management determination and is a challenge to maintain as time goes by when the company grows fast or has a large number of employees working remotely.

Purposeful Communication

Communication is one of the most valuable skills that everyone at the company has to master. To build the company’s culture with remote teams, essentially you need to communicate more and communicate with a purpose. The company has to set a framework of communication, define topics, tools, channels, and timing. Creating a communications framework gives predictability and accountability to the team.

Part of this work includes training the employees on communication, active listening, empathy, clarity and concision. Also, it could be necessary to train them on the tools the company uses so nobody feels left behind. It applies to everyone; staff, managers, C-level.

Encourage video meetings only, employees should not be allowed to join by phone or with the camera off. The technology and the tools are available, so there are no excuses. You always have to connect with the camera on, it doesn’t matter if you are at home, or a cafe. For the whole team to get to know each other, it is vital to see each other’s faces frequently.

Organise in person off sites at least a couple of times per year. The whole point of the trip is to have fun, not to work. The purpose is for the team to bond and to get to know each other better.

When your remote team works in different time zones, try to coordinate working hours for them to overlap at least a few hours per day.

Onboarding

It is ideal to start communicating the company’s culture to candidates in the interview process and then formalise it during the onboarding process. Even if you have one employee not working in the office, you need to figure out the policies and procedures to make them feel included, part of the company and even with everybody else.

It is a challenge to get to genuinely know your team or colleagues from other teams when people work remotely. Creating activities in which the focus is solely fraternising with the rest of the team helps to grow a positive company culture with a remote team.

Measure remote team engagement and mental health

In the same way you measure staff engagement, you should periodically measure the level of commitment remote workers show towards the company. During this exercise, try to include topics like general happiness, if they feel lonely or isolated, and communication (with peers and corporate). This exercise usually has side effects such as opening a dialogue with employees who need to discuss non-work related issues.

Keep track of potential mental health-related problems. It is common for people to think that working remotely is great, but actually, it is hard to create work-life boundaries while working from home.

Having a company that lives the culture every day is challenging, and doing so with people working remotely makes it even more difficult. Building your company culture under these circumstances requires management determination, a communication framework and allocating the right amount of time for this purpose.