A Leader’s Guide to Cultivating Culture in the Age of Remote-first Work
Embracing the shift to remote work brings new opportunities and challenges.
Remote and hybrid work is here to stay no matter what your personal feelings about them may be. To ensure teams thrive in a remote-first world, leaders must intentionally cultivate a unique, substantive corporate culture, says Ann Schlemmer, CEO at Percona.
In 1979, at the height of the oil crisis, IBM experimented. With a keen interest in reducing the gas-guzzling impact of the average corporate commute, IBM allowed five of its senior engineers to try working from home for exactly one month.
By 1983, some 2,000 IBM employees were regularly working from home.
Despite the success of this early experiment in remote work (or “telecommuting,” as it was called at the time), the practice would remain a relative oddity for the next thirty-odd years. That is, until 2020, when the pandemic forced organizations to go fully remote practically overnight or risk shuttering completely.
Reframing Why We Work Remotely
Despite the pace and the challenges, most organizations successfully adapted to remote work. Employers and employees alike soon found that it offered various benefits, including increased productivity, reduced overhead, access to significantly wider talent pools, improved retention rates, a reduced carbon footprint, and even increased revenues.
Although a number of high-profile corporations have since issued return-to-office mandates, the reality is that they’re still facing an uphill battle. Indeed, a recent study from Gartner found that over a third (39%) of global knowledge workers will continue to work remotely at least part of the time by the end of 2023. And of those organizations that have issued full-on return-to-office orders, a fair number have already reversed course.
But this is more than just a matter of being unable to put the genie back in the bottle. This is a question of embracing what is undeniably a more efficient, productive, and egalitarian way of working. And, if you want your workforce to be culturally aligned with the idea of remote work, it would be wise to begin by disentangling the “why” of remote work from its associations with the pandemic.
Cultivating Remote Culture Begins with Intentionality
While many people tend to draw the line at the pandemic to understand our current remote-first culture, the truth is the world had been trending toward remote work long before 2020. My company, for example, has been a fully remote organization since its founding in 2006.
And when I joined the company in 2013, a sizable portion of the global workforce was already working from home at least once a week. While being fully remote was still rather unusual at the time, it didn’t take long for me to recognize the immense advantages the model provides. Nor did it take me long to feel like I was part of a team with a clear cultural identity.
And, although it wasn’t immediately apparent to me then, I’ve since come to realize that company’s cultural success has everything to do with intentionality.
When working in an office setting, many aspects of corporate culture emerge organically from our immediate context and environment. Even seemingly superficial elements, like decor and office layout, can spawn a cultural identity. This “easy” culture is not possible in a remote environment. However, rather than look at this as a disadvantage, leaders should look at this as an opportunity.
The absence of these unthinking, passive elements of culture forces leaders to be much more intentional about the culture they cultivate. No longer can you lean into the fact that you have a ping pong table to do the heavy lifting of cultural construction. Instead, you must concretize and vocalize what you feel your culture should be. And when done right, that kind of intentional culture building carries much more weight than one’s office decor choice.
Use the newfound challenge of remote work to reassess what kind of culture you want at your organization. Then, put it down in writing. To put it into words is to give the ideas shape and make oneself accountable.
See More: 6 Essential Remote Work Tools HR Needs to Deploy
Embrace Strategic Over-communication
Regarding remote work environments, one of the greatest pitfalls people can make is assuming that everyone is aware of everyone else’s presence and contributions. In an office setting, we can all see one another, and from that visibility comes trust. However, achieving that degree of visibility in a remote setting requires effort.
Leaders should intentionally increase teams’ visibility and highlight successes. Policies that encourage visibility by default can go a long way to cultivating a trusting, integrated culture; and fostering a sense of community and belonging among employees.
The right collaboration software stack can help increase visibility. Make sure yours includes at least one of each of the following:
- Real-time chat (e.g. Gchat, Slack)
- File-sharing software (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive)
- Video conferencing tools (e.g. Zoom, Teams)
- Project management software (e.g. Asana, Trello)
- Developer collaboration tools (e.g. Github, Gitlab)
- Creativity tools ( Adobe Creative Cloud, GIMP)
And when adopting collaboration software, make sure your teams use the status settings to indicate their availability or lack of same. Seeing coworkers’ names with a green light beside them lets you know they’re open to being interrupted.
Conversely, use the status field to let others know when they’re not(e.g., “head’s down on Q4 reports”, “On a coffee run”). When we can’t immediately see where our teammates are and what they’re up to, it becomes more important to vocalize as much as possible.
Project management tools also create an asynchronous but shared sense of progress on activities. Rather than relying on individuals to send separate communications to update everyone on a team about the status of a project, these tools allow everyone to turn to a single “source of truth.”
See More: Effective Communication in the Workplace: How and Why?
Strike the Right Balance Between Hands-on and Hands-off
With all that being said, leaders should be careful not to turn the virtue of visibility into a source of micro-management. Managers that police employees’ availability status will quickly sow discontent and resentment among employees who take necessary breaks and will encourage gamesmanship around “perceived productivity.”
And this point touches on one of the hardest things most leaders encounter when trying to establish a remote culture, striking the right balance between hands-on management and employee independence. This is so challenging because there isn’t a one size fits all answer to how much management is enough. The nature of what your organization does will dictate what the right balance may be.
However, certain tenets hold regardless of company size or industry. First and foremost, leaders should remember that they are employing adults. As such, erring on the side of trust will go a long way to give your workers the confidence and space needed to excel in their roles. There’s no worse workplace productivity enemy than micromanagement, including excessive meetings.
Make Space for Face-to-face
Whatever your opinion of remote work, it’s here to stay. Most workers want it, and the benefits for both employees and employers far outweigh the disadvantages.
However, none of this is meant to dismiss the value of in-person interaction. On the contrary, we need in-person interaction occasionally in our personal and professional lives. So, remote-first organizations should be even more committed to yearly in-person gatherings to encourage team building and nurture interpersonal relationships. That cadence will depend on what works best for your team and organization.
And, at the end of the day, when you establish a healthy, robust remote culture, your employees will be all the more invested in the in-person events you hold.
What challenges have you faced in the remote first work culture, and what are the opportunities? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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