Managing Culture in a Remote Environment

I have noticed a new piece of conventional wisdom emerging these days that suggests it is more difficult to nurture and support your workplace culture when most of your staff works remotely most of the time. Like much of conventional wisdom, this piece is not very wise.

In 2020 the world of work changed, because everyone learned that the flexibility of determining when and where you did your work is a really great thing. It improves employee engagement, productivity, and work-life balance (p.s., entrepreneurs like me could have told you this decades ago). Doing work co-located with colleagues is important too, however, so I believe some form of hybrid work is going to be the norm for knowledge workers moving forward. Despite some high-profile calls for everyone to be back at the office all the time, I think that ship has sailed.

Once most of us started working remotely, however, it quickly became apparent that remote work can sometimes feel isolating. I’ve heard lots of laments about missing those hallway conversations or chats around the lunch table that were consistently present when we all worked at the office. Part of that lamenting ties into workplace culture—a lot of people believe that without those more consistent interactions with others in the office, it becomes harder to understand what the culture is or to develop it intentionally.

The truth is it CAN be more difficult, but it doesn’t need to be.

Think about it: how did you communicate or develop your culture before we were remote? If the answer escapes you, then THAT is the problem, not the remote part. I do think that being able to continuously observe others in the office, noticing their moods, interactions, and random thoughts is a piece of how we understand the culture. But so are the KPIs that are shared in weekly staff meetings, the way managers speak to employees during team meetings, what the CEO chooses to discuss at the all-hands meeting, not to mention the hiring process, onboarding process, and performance management process—and all of those things happen in a remote environment pretty much like they did before. The majority of the tools we have to understand, nurture, and develop our culture are still at our disposal in a remote environment.

So step one is to make sure you are using those tools to intentionally create a culture that makes your organization (and the people in it) successful. Design processes, structures, and systems so they reinforce the culture you want. (If you need help with that, I know a guy named Jamie who can help!) But back to the feeling isolated part—I do think organizations struggle with ways to recreate both the informal interactions and the relationship-building activities that used to happen more or less naturally in the office. So there’s some work to be done there. Here are some strategies I see organizations using:

Regular staff/team retreats. Retreats happened before remote work, of course, but I am seeing them happen more frequently and regularly now, with more time spent on the relationship-building aspects, since it’s the only time everyone is together.

Offices with more open/meeting space. For those that are hybrid, time in the office is filled almost exclusively with in-person meetings (typically longer or more complex meetings that are more difficult on teams/zoom). That makes private office space less important, so some are reconfiguring their office space.

Expanded mentoring programs. Mentoring programs were also fairly commonplace pre-pandemic, but I think they are on the rise because it is a structured way to make sure people make connections across levels in the hierarchy (and they now have virtual platforms for managing them, which works well in a remote environment).

Experiments with virtual informal interactions. We all did the virtual happy/coffee hours when the pandemic hit, and then we all abandoned them once they felt like “forced fun.” But don’t stop experimenting. Keep trying things until you find what works. I advocate for a teams meeting everyone is invited to at noon called “lunch,” so remote workers can eat and chat together; it’s the same as the lunch table I used to eat at everyday when I worked in an office.

Rituals and artifacts for communicating culture. If you can’t “absorb” culture as easily when remote, then be more explicit about teaching people the culture. Open every team meeting by sharing an example of someone living the cultural values. Give people virtual backgrounds that have key cultural principles listed. Add culture-specific activities into that annual staff retreat. Over-communicate the culture.

Just because you’re working more remotely, doesn’t mean culture must take a back seat. Stay on top of it and learn how to use new tools to nurture and develop your culture virtually.