Use a recognition tool like Nectar to share those values and make them a part of your team’s vision. The number of employees working from home is steadily on the rise. Since the pandemic, this number has boomed, and many organizations are deciding to stay remote. If you were around for 2020, you know how challenging it is to create a stellar company culture.

But to turn colleagues into teammates, you need a healthy team culture in the workplace. Identify your company’s core values and make sure they are true guideposts for you and your team. We talk about them in annual reviews and in our New Hire Orientation. We use hashtags based on our core values–like #ClientFirst and #ContinuousImprovement–in chat conversations. Meeting in person even once a year helps us build real relationships that can then be maintained remotely. We host regional meetups as well as our annual all-company Summit. When your remote workforce is driven by your values and mission, they’ll have a clear purpose and expectations to motivate them.

Use More Video

Ask them to fill in as many answers as they’re comfortable providing. This quick introduction will help your team connect on common ground when they do finally meet. Hal Walling helps technology brands use storytelling to connect with customers. A fiction writer in his free time, his short stories have appeared in many of North America’s oldest and finest literary journals. Then, on March 6, one week before the festival was set to begin, local officials announced the cancellation of South by Southwest. The news surprised Vicki Apodaca, Joust’s Head of Marketing and Communications.

Building a strong work culture for your remote team is critical for its growth and success. There are so many moving parts to consider, especially if you want to do more than the bare minimum.

Cultivate An Environment Of Trust

Employees will naturally gravitate toward people of shared interests, so a group chat is a great way for remote employees to bond over their personal passions. Whether it be a shared love of family pets, music, celebrities, travel, etc., having these conversations helps keep teams engaged and connected. A great way to start the workday is to host a breakfast club, where people come together with their favorite breakfasts to make light conversation and get to know one another. This is especially fun for remote build culture in team teams because there’s always a few individuals who go all out on their breakfast. Limit these group video meetings to ten or fewer of people across departments to ensure everyone has a chance to talk. When employees continually work remotely, one of your key goals must be to maintain company culture and keep employees proactive and engaged. You can still preserve the in-office community you worked hard to build, one that promotes communication, collaboration, and employee contribution — and success!

While we don’t encourage the use of emojis or gifs as primary forms of communication , we do encourage their use as an emotional form of communication . Over time, an established team might develop custom emojis to express memes or shared inside jokes.

Build A Sense Of Shared Leadership

When it’s accepted as a cultural norm, you can more easily work within parameters that give you control over your work and home life. “When many on the team are working from home, you have people who seemingly never stop working and struggle with how to define their personal life and work when it’s all in one place,” Keil says. Since you won’t run into your colleagues for hallway chats, make it a point to schedule conversations just to catch up, and be explicit about the purpose of your conversation. Even in a virtual environment where face-to-face interactions aren’t possible, leaders can signal their intent for a casual conversation. Once these guidelines become a part of your virtual corporate culture, you’ll be less inclined to make a knee-jerk decision that your team needs a Zoom call every time you have a quick update to share. As an executive coach, Keil hears a lot of frustration from leaders who feel that their days are now consumed with meetings. According to Keil, leaders must seize this opportunity to be involved in setting norms for a new remote work culture.

Elfster that can coordinate gift exchanges anonymously, and people can create wish lists making the process easier than ever. A great rule of thumb is to focus on the output of your employees rather than the amount of hours they spend online. It can be defined simply as the way things get done, or it can be viewed as a multi-faceted system of objects, values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors. It outlines the accepted behaviors and attitudes that you want your employees to adopt. You get to decide as a team what your ritual is, but you do need to decide on a ritual or something that your team does that most of the organization doesn’t do.

You don’t need to be physically together to volunteer for a project. Pick an organization that’s in need of some help with something your team is skilled at. Perhaps if you’re a tech company, offer some developer assistance to improve a non-profit’s website or provide marketing assistance to a group that’s hosting an upcoming event.

Culture Is About How You Work

To make your product training work, I recommend that you use a hybrid approach. Use pre-recorded content to set the foundation and then leave the door open to staff to schedule video calls to address any questions they may have. Video collaborations are another way to break free of the remote work constraints, connect with your coworkers and collaborate with them in real-time, as you would have if you were in an office.

Each time a scenario arises where there is no clearly defined answer, look to your company values to determine the answer, and then document. At GitLab, we encourage team members to surface culture on a regular basis through the following mechanisms.

• Likewise, if you are getting together for fun, you should aim for 10x more bonding than a video or voice call.
• With disruption at every level, there was little time or energy remaining for company culture.
• The single best study on a great remote team culture was conducted a couple of years ago before all of the madness and the forced work-from-home experiment that many of us had to partake in started.
• Regardless, the general consensus seems to be that culture in a team isn’t about individual performances, personalities or attitudes—it’s about how the team works together as a cohesive unit.
• At Slack, we’ve seen this as an opportunity to make executives more approachable, show our own vulnerability, and transform the culture into one that more explicitly values individuals and individuality.

Encourage teams to cook together or share recipes to keep meal prep interesting. While remote work comes with a lot of perks, it also comes with its own unique challenges. It’s important to embrace the nuances that come with remote work, and here’s a few tips for how to do just that.

How Do You Improve The Culture Of A Virtual Team?

Together with online whiteboard tools such as Miro, and Stormboard, you can use video collaboration to help team members brainstorm and plan different projects. For your all-hands meetings, you can create and host a scheduled live stream directly from your computer or set up a video conference call. Using video today isn’t a new idea by any stretch but it is a powerful one. In recent months, we’ve seen how the pandemic skyrocketed the adoption of video and remote work.

In other words, your culture has to be built around a strong mission and values that unite the team. The easiest way to put it is that your company culture is the experience employees have working at your company or on your team. If this is not feasible, and your company operates elsewhere on the spectrum of remote, ensure that your culture reinforces a remote-first way of doing business. It’s important for leadership to set the tone, but it’s even more important to document what will define your culture.

The idea is that it’s OK to be stressed — we’re human — but we want to balance that stress and create empathy. Some Mondays, you’ve had a bad weekend or you’ve woken up on the wrong foot. For me, I try to push my team to take a moment, pause, and really feel it. On how she fosters and sustains a thriving culture within a remote-first company.

People Also Ask These Questions About Remote Work Culture

They know bonding is important but they are about getting things done and that means timeboxes. Start and end on time and if you don’t accomplish all of your agenda then retrospectives are a useful place to talk about how to improve. It’s not just meetings though, effective teams members are aware of their work habits. They schedule a time to get work done, to take breaks, to stretch, to eat. When you are working remotely a schedule is a type of discipline needed for your morale and sense of responsibility to the team. This doesn’t mean you have to be rigid but each person needs to be aware of how they are spending the currency of time.

If your company offers an education stipend, it can be an incentive to take the class without having to front the cost. Since you’re not in the office, you don’t get to see your colleagues desk pictures or meet the people closest to them as you might with in-office colleagues.

Company

Decrease in stress levels – A positive culture can help reduce employee stress levels. “Today, it was 100 points to Lacey for organizing a virtual pub trivia event for the whole team — hashtag #simplesolutions, hashtag #ownership,” Ali says. And video is undoubtedly one of the GraphQL best presentation tools you can use. It’s easily accessible, available on-demand, and can save time and overhead from having multiple trainers on staff. There are also over a dozen video editing programs that can help you finalize and polish your video with just a few clicks.

This will give employees the ability to go back and read those values whenever they are unsure about how to act or execute on their work. The traditional office landscape is changing – and with this new way of work, new challenges are arising. One of these challenges is building a positive culture when your entire team is working remotely.

Being able to drop a relevant GIF or meme seconds after a timely Slack comment is one of the more spectacularly amusing things that happen in our little digital office place. Slack, in particular, has a great Giphy integration where you start a message with /giphy followed by your search term and you can insert a relevant GIF. So get in the habit of sending out monthly or quarterly anonymous surveys to gauge how well your company’s upholding its values. These social connection times will strengthen team bonds and allow teammates to understand each other better. Do these small yet thoughtful acts, and your employees will feel seen, appreciated, and special.