How to Improve Your Remote Company Culture

There is no rule that says your remote teams can’t enjoy workforce culture. In fact, remote teams have their own cultures, and, if you build them right, they will help you retain your workers and keep your teams engaged no matter where they work. Here’s how your remote teams can build a better culture to help your business succeed.

Top Components of Company Culture

We believe that remote teams can be as productive, collaborative, and engaged as the best teams that work in an office setting. But we also believe organizations must work on building their culture in a way that keeps teams functioning well.

There are four critical components to culture that your organization should pay attention to:

  1. Communication is critical if you don’t want your remote workers to feel isolated. You can do this with great technology tools that allow instant messaging, project management, and video chats. Managers should be trained to use these tools to touch base with workers every day to see how they’re doing and if they can help. This effort should begin on the employee’s first day as a new hire and continue throughout their tenure.
  2. Build community by engaging in video meetups with your team. Also, set up mentoring so that one-on-one personal relationships start to form. Employees are more likely to stay on the job if they have one or more workplace friends.
  3. Create a narrative by telling your story. Where did the company come from? What traditions bind you together? Are there challenges you’ve overcome together? What vision drives the success of the organization? Make your goals attainable, authentic, and work to create buy-in. This will help build a sense of purpose throughout the organization and build history and the collective stories that can be passed down from long-term employees to new workers.
  4. What values matter to your organization? Define your company’s core values but do it in a way that engages your workforce. After all, company values should be built by the employees that live those values every day. Don’t make the mistake of creating values and then dictating them to your workforce; that’s no way to achieve buy-in. Then reinforce those values by rewarding workers who exhibit those values.

Culture is about how your organization works, collaborates and behaves. It’s different for every team, but remote teams sometimes worry that they’re missing out on something an in-office team has. This doesn’t have to be the case, particularly because culture isn’t about having ping pong in the office or making Friday dress-down day. Culture is about how you treat each other, how you treat customers, and how you do the work.

Ask your team these questions to start to define what your workplace culture means to them:

  • Is speed more important than quality in our interactions with customers?
  • Do we take the time to share stories about our families, our pets, or other things that are important to us?
  • How do we communicate? When is email better than an instant message? When is a video conference the best way to communicate with a remote team?
  • When does work stop? 40 hours? 80 hours?
  • How do we reward each other for good work?
  • How do we handle difficult conversations?

All of these questions help you define remote team culture. Considering how your remote team functions, what matters to these teams, and then working to improve our interactions together will help your remote team build their culture, not tear it down.

Blackstone Talent Group works with companies to help find top talent to help improve the company. We can help your teams by finding the right fit. Call on us.

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