Key Points

• Company culture can still exist in the confines of a remote work environment.
• A strong culture is reinforced by open communication and collaboration between teams.
• Most of the groundwork for a strong corporate culture starts with the leadership.

How do you maintain company culture when your entire team is remote? Going hybrid or fully remote doesn’t mean you have to forego maintaining a company culture. Some organizations realize and maintain a vibrant company culture despite the challenges of remote work. It is a matter of simply balancing and planning how to establish things.

That said, you can employ a few strategies to maintain a grip on your company culture. Some of these are things you’re likely already doing. However, a few are possibly the lynchpins of how you’ll decide your organization’s overall trajectory when moving to a remote workflow. With that in mind, let’s dive in and see what you can do to maintain a strong corporate identity.

Understanding Remote Work

Before we start establishing some of the ground rules for your company culture, it is important to understand remote work. Contrary to popular belief, not every single job needs to be relegated to an in-person office position. As we’ve seen since the start and subsequent aftermath of the COVID-19 epidemic, some industries can flourish when working remotely.

Remote work is a little more free-form in nature, with flexible scheduling and work environments being the norm. Since the focus is taken away from the office, it is up to the employee to create a suitable working environment. Some industries have seen massive returns on this switch, thanks in part to the reduced overhead.

Other teams struggle with the transition to remote work, as I’ll detail a little further on. It isn’t a catch-all or a cure for that which ails an organization. Instead, think of remote work as another approach to solving the issue of getting work done and keeping customers happy in the long term.

Challenges Posed by Remote Work

Remote work isn’t a bed of roses, there are some serious considerations you’ll need to keep in mind. First, it isn’t an approach that encourages or promotes the concept of communication. That isn’t to say that it is without the means to communicate, but without a firm framework established, it can become asynchronous by nature.

Further, remote work can exemplify a sense of isolation and disconnection from teams. This in turn leads to a drop in productivity, as workers try to determine their place within an organization. It’s a lot harder to see the forest for the trees it would seem.

Finally, one of the biggest hurdles posed by remote work is a sense of timeliness and structure. Without the proper controls in place, you risk the potential for slipping deadlines and an overall decrease in the quality of your team’s output. Thankfully, these are fairly simple issues on the whole to rectify.

How to Maintain Company Culture in Remote Environments

Now that we’ve highlighted some of the issues present, how do you maintain company culture in remote environments? In all honesty, the same concepts you’d use to build a team in a physical space still apply, as you’ll see. However, the approach is where things make the most noted difference. Since you can’t rely on a physical space, you’ll need to consider a few different factors when building up your company culture.

With the right materials and infrastructure in place, however, you’ll notice that you’re seeing greater returns from your workers. A strong company culture is a must for any organization, as it helps them maintain an identity and ethos when pursuing projects, interacting with customers, and ultimately conducting teams.

Remote work isn’t a death knell for the likes of company culture, and with the provisions detailed, you should be forging a strong and unique culture regardless of the environment. So, with that in mind, let’s dive in and start looking at the ways you can strengthen corporate culture without a physical space for your employees.

Establish Trust

The first method of improving company culture in a remote environment comes down to trust. Trust is a two-way transaction in this case. Your employees need to trust you, and you need to trust your employees. At the end of the day, this is the cornerstone of your organization. Without trust, you don’t have a foundation to conduct business.

As such, take the time to establish and build trust. Whether it’s new employees or respected team members you’ve had for years, establishing and building trust is going to go the distance when it comes to your company culture.

Corporate culture can be nebulous at times, but it is a reflection of the ethos, morality, and overall mental state of the leadership. Without the right controls in place, like trust, it can readily become ineffective and corrupted over time. Lay a good foundation, and this won’t be a concern later down the road.

Focus on Employees

Remote work can be characterized by distance. I don’t mean this in a physical sense, although that is true, but rather in an emotional sense. This ties right back into trust, but you want to minimize the distance for your employees. Employees should be able to express opinions, give feedback, and ultimately communicate ideas effectively.

Team leaders should be approachable and understanding, listening and understanding the needs of individual team members. Further, you can start doing exercises to improve employee morale, leading to increases in productivity.

If a team member doesn’t feel valued, their work suffers as a result. As such, when considering company culture in a remote environment, you’ll want to minimize that distance. Let your employees know they are valued and valuable members of your organization and it won’t matter if your setting is virtual or physical.

Have a Firmly Established Communication Infrastructure

So how do you focus on employees and establish trust in remote company culture? Communication is going to be vital to any of these elements, as well as future subjects as we discuss things further. A solid communication pipeline is going to be your best friend in this scenario. You should have multiple avenues for approaching communication.

With that, I mean don’t solely rely on a single tool. The likes of emails, voice conferencing, and virtual chat programs should be used. Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Citrix are great ways of keeping in touch with your employees.

Further, many of these tools allow for the creation of spaces and channels, which can help to organize how you’re communicating with your team. None of the ways you’ll succeed in establishing a strong remote company culture are going to come about without the necessary groundwork. As such, you’ll want a solid means of communicating with your team.

Collaborate

Ultimately, most work is a team effort. Projects aren’t spearheaded by a single individual. Just because you’re in a virtual space, however, doesn’t mean you need to forego teamwork. There are numerous tools on the market like G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, and others that allow for active contributions and collaboration regardless of the distance.

Additionally, you’ve got no shortage of mapping tools, job management software, and so forth to establish a firm means of promoting teamwork within your organization. When push comes to shove, you’ll want to make sure your team members understand they are part of a whole.

Cohesion is also a top consideration in these scenarios. With any luck, you’ve taken the steps to establish trust and minimize the emotional distance between your employees and the organization. This helps to open the

Encourage Employee Connections

It isn’t enough for leadership to communicate and establish inroads with employees. As you’re all part of a team, they need to connect as well. Establishing strong employee connections reinforces the concept of the team, and shows that employees can rely on one another as they progress through work.

This can be aided with the creation of specific team channels in programs like Slack or simply encouraging your team to converse with one another during a project. You can’t insist everyone be friends, but you can certainly nudge your team toward productive cooperation.

Projects are a team effort, as I’ve said, and strong employee connections are the bedrock of successful projects. A company culture doesn’t exist without people in it, so strong teams with solid connections are going to yield better results in the long term.

Conduct Virtual Team Building Exercises

You can’t rightly gather up your team to go out for drinks after work, at least when working remotely. However, that doesn’t mean you have to forego solid team-building exercises. As such, there are a few different ways to approach building your team and company culture in a virtual setting. You could, for example, lead efforts toward playing online games together. Games like Drawful, Scrabble, and other online games aren’t resource-intensive and can provide hours of entertainment.

Additionally, you could look to conduct more relaxed meetings and the like through Zoom. With a little searching around on sites like Cameo, YouTube, and elsewhere, you can get celebrities, influencers, and other key figures in pop culture to make appearances.

Your remote team and company culture don’t have to be solely focused on profits. You should be able to have fun and cut loose now and again. Encourage and do this regularly, and you’ll see some surprisingly great results from your team.

Get to Know Your Teams

One of the most important things any team leader can do is to know their employees. I don’t mean knowing their names and positions in the organization. Instead, I’m talking about laying the groundwork to get to know these people personally.

If you’re looking to build a strong company culture, that starts first and foremost with knowing the building blocks of your company. Your employees are the driving force behind any organizational efforts. Getting to know them as people will help your company to succeed, regardless of the distance.

An employee that you know on a personal level is going to feel that emotional distance encouraged virtual work environments shorten dramatically. Trust me, when you treat employees like they are valued and important members of an organization, they act it.

Practice Your Culture Intentionally

Company culture starts at the very top. If leadership isn’t practicing and embodying the ethos and standards of a remote company culture, then it is a non-starter. While many of the pointers and strategies discussed today focus on the interaction between team and leadership, this is one area where leadership needs to take the reins.

If you aren’t embodying the values you’re espousing, then why should your team? As such, you need to take a nuanced approach to embody the values of your company culture. When that’s done, you’ll notice your team is more likely to practice the same culture in turn.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Now that we’ve discussed the tools needed to make your company culture flourish, let’s focus on some other ideas. If you don’t know how to overcome the normal challenges posed by remote work, then you can see diminishing returns on your output. Thankfully, our guide on the subject more than covers your bases so you can focus on what matters most.

Additionally, you might want to look into how artificial intelligence is going to impact some industries. Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and its far-reaching implications haven’t been fully determined just yet. We take a closer look at the industries that stand to lose the most when it comes to the advent of artificial intelligence.

Conclusion

Building a strong company culture isn’t solely dependent on whether it’s in-person or in a virtual setting. Instead, it comes down to putting in the groundwork to establish an environment where employees feel encouraged to partake in the company culture. When that is done, you’ve successfully created a strong and flourishing corporate culture.

The image featured at the top of this post is ©Ground Picture/Shutterstock.com.