Key Points

• While CEOs may not like it, remote work is undoubtedly here to stay. 
• Plenty of evidence supports the idea that employees are much happier working remotely. 
• Having a strong culture is key to making remote work successful. 

While remote work was already expected to grow pre-pandemic, the global pandemic in 2020 opened the doors for companies worldwide to shift to a remote or hybrid work environment. This was good news for employees everywhere who wanted a better work-life balance. 

For employers, remote work should make for happier and hopefully more productive employees. It also means reduced overhead without the need for office buildings. However, more effort is required to ensure a continuously growing culture that can grow even if it occurs via Zoom. 

What Is Remote Work Culture

To understand why having a remote work culture can be so important, it’s important to remember exactly what a remote work culture is. In simple terms, a remote work culture is what will shape the way people behave in the company, including their behavior and attitude toward not just work but also their fellow employees, management, and even the company itself. 

You could even say that remote work will be defined digitally, as employees have to stay connected through means other than physical. This means discussing shared interests like television shows, vacation chats, and watercooler conversations regularly occurring in a kitchen or coffee room. 

With a strong remote culture, employees will be happier and more willing to go the extra mile. This might mean staying late or getting on early, responding to emails at off-hours, and doing other things that would have otherwise been forbidden after they left a physical office. 

Why A Remote Culture Is Important 

It should go without saying, but if you look at companies where corporate culture isn’t working well, remote or otherwise, it will hurt everything, including the bottom line. In many ways, employees might feel that waking up and going to a job they hate is less preferable than just being unemployed. 

Employees who hate their work environment are less engaged, less collaborative, and less willing to go the extra mile. A positive remote work culture can rectify all these things and much more. 

Benefits of a Remote Work Culture 

From the start, any company that focuses heavily on remote work culture is going to have a leg up when trying to land new employees. Word gets around fast, and companies focused heavily on ensuring that a remote work culture is welcoming and inclusive will almost universally find a larger talent pool to draw from. 

1. More Collaboration

While many old-school CEOs will want you to believe that the only way to collaborate is to be in the same room together, this isn’t true. In fact, it’s not accurate at all, and it’s a scare tactic if nothing else. 

The reality is that there is more collaboration among employees when a strong remote work culture exists. If you have the right tools, like a video chat platform, there are still ways for employees to interact as if they were sitting in the same room, which means collaboration doesn’t have to slow down or stop. 

2. Greater Productivity

As I’ve already touched on, one of the biggest benefits of remote work has been around the idea that working remotely means increased productivity. I can draw from my own example here and say that instead of spending two hours commuting, I could spend an additional two hours every day getting more work done, responding to emails, working on presentations, or anything else that needed my attention. 

3. Lots of Innovation 

This benefit ties directly back to the idea of being more collaborative, as a result of that collaboration, there will be more innovation. Employees working at a company where remote work and culture are prioritized will feel energized to be more creative and innovative both by themselves and when working with their teammates. 

4. Growing Job Satisfaction 

The writing is transparent on the wall, showing a direct correlation between job satisfaction and remote work. If you add remote work with a strong culture, job satisfaction will become even more meaningful. In fact, you would likely find that many employees think that company culture is as important if not more important than a higher salary. 

5. Good for Customers

Anything that can be done to improve employee satisfaction through culture efforts will likely result in better customer results. There is truth to the saying that happy employees mean happy customers, or at least that’s something someone once said somewhere. 

Employees with a strong remote culture who can do their work more efficiently will be more than willing to spend more time with customers with urgent issues. 

6. Less Employee Turnover

Going back to the idea that happier employees are more than willing to sacrifice some money for more money, a strong remote work culture also means less employee turnover. Suppose an employee finds themselves in a situation where they feel respected and their work is appreciated. In that case, it’s hard to think of so there is likely to be less turnover as employees walk away to find different work. 

7. Bigger Applicant Pool

Another strong idea supporting a positive remote work culture is that companies will have a (much) larger applicant pool to choose from. In many cases, if you require employees to come into an office, you only need to look locally for talent. However, a remote company can look anywhere in the country or the world to find the best people for a role. 

How to Build A Strong Culture In Remote Work Environments

Anytime you want to build a successful team, you have to work at it, whether this team is remote or right next to you. A thriving culture goes well beyond just having employees happy with their work, as there are several things you can do to build this culture even more. 

1. Start With Trust and Transparency

Whether you already think your employees already have trust, everything starts with transparency and trust. Any person in a leadership role should be very transparent about any business decisions, no matter how small or inconsequential they may seem. Recent surveys indicate that over 84% of employees are more satisfied with their jobs when their employers are more transparent. 

2. Strong Remote Work Policy

One of the main priorities any employer should establish, not just to build a strong culture, but to continuously improve on it, is to have a clear remote work policy. This means what your expected working hours are, any important communication tools you should have downloaded, what the expectations are for your role, and any training and/or education resources that will help. 

3. Feeling Safe

Among the easiest ways to destroy a culture in a remote or any work environment is to have employees be fearful that any bad decisions or honest mistakes will be met with serious repercussions. Making sure that employees are welcome to speak up and share any ideas they might have should be welcomed with open arms and not frowned upon. 

4. The Right Technology 

The right technology will go a long way toward building up remote work and its culture. Ultimately, technology will make a break in remote work, so any decision around the tools being used is crucial. Whether a video chat platform like Zoom or a project management platform like Asana, the right tools will make or break much of the work experience. 

5. Perfect The Onboarding Experience

Within the first few days or weeks of joining a company, employees will immediately know the culture and whether it fits them well. This is why a remote-focused onboarding experience should require much time to get right. 

Whether this is as simple as telling someone how to sign up for benefits, create a login, or set up their work computer, companies should consider assigning an experienced employee in the right department to help guide new employees. 

6. Regular Check-Ins

Anyone who manages at least one employee should take this step. Regular check-ins with your team, better known as one-on-one, will improve a remote work culture. It’s also vital that employees understand their expectations during working hours. 

These meetings should also be open forums to discuss what’s working and any roadblocks the employee faces. In these meetings, employees will know if their work is appreciated and supported. Better yet, employees should also be able to use this time to provide feedback to their managers about how the company can improve the culture or identify what’s going wrong. 

7. Anonymous Surveys

Anonymous surveys can open a can of worms, but not every employee wants to put their name on any critical feedback. This is why a truly anonymous survey might be super beneficial to hear about how a company can continue to adjust and improve the remote work culture. Tools like SurveyMonkey make this super easy for employers to achieve. 

8. Staying Flexible

Any company that wants to improve their remote work culture continuously will remain flexible and nimble. This means they will not only ask for feedback, but act on it if there is a consensus that something isn’t working or that a better way to achieve a goal exists. 

This might involve acting on something learned through an anonymous survey, which will only result in employees being more honest with these surveys, which ties directly back to continuous improvement. 

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

If you love working in a remote environment (I know I do), then it’s partially your responsibility to help a company succeed in this area. Creating a remote work culture that can continuously improve isn’t easy, but if it does work, there is no question that a company will likely be more successful. 

Perhaps the most important thing is that creating a work culture, whether remote or in-person, takes time and doesn’t always work well at first. This is a learning process, meaning that employees can’t think too far into the future if a company shows that it wants to make changes. 

Conclusion 

The bottom line is that whether giant corporations want to admit it or not, remote work is here to stay. These companies can try and force employees back into the office all they want, but the reality is that many employees, including some of the most talented and essential members of teams will opt to leave a company if they are forced back into an office after years of working remotely, which is only going to harm a culture.

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