Quick Wins for Improving Your Remote Culture

Part 2: Ideas to improve your remote culture, right now.

A fully-remote company and team culture! It’s a concept that is relatively new to our world, and as such, the conversation must continue to evolve and expand. The list of potential nuances, strategic plans, ideas and decisions for us to think about goes on and on, and these topics should always be reassessed and planned for.

But what about right now?

We’re remote right now because we have to be. Last week when I let my mind wander I came up with a seemingly indefinite list of questions to ask and think about. This week, however, I have some ideas. A fully-baked plan will come with time and research, but now is the time to find small ways to make an impact.

If you’re going to stop reading right now, take this with you: Care, connect, over-communicate, and commit. These 4 C’s are the summary of my recommendations for creating company culture in a new remote workplace.

Partners in Leadership

Below are some of the top questions I asked and some ideas to help answer them:

How do you engage the crowd in a big meeting?

Incorporating methods for engagement into your meetings is key to limit distractions and involve attendees. For example, during IRL group meetings we brainstormed and fed off of each other’s ideas, adding, challenging and discussing key topics. How can we recreate that?

• Companies are already realizing the impact of isolation and creating tools to combat it. FullStory’s newest product, BWAMP, helps celebrate wins. BWAMP is a separate feedback channel that runs alongside video meetings, allowing your team to participate directly (and instantly) with vital feedback to the speaker through sound bites and reactions.
• Utilize the chat function in your conferencing tool of choice. Let the chat blow up with questions, reactions and encouragement. If you don’t have a chat function, dedicate a channel in Slack or a Google doc to capture reactions.

How do you encourage questions within a big and/or shy group?

Big meetings as a shy person are already intimidating, but imagine being just a box on a screen that you hope gets highlighted and heard over others. It’s hard to choose to single yourself out and ask a question, or bring up a topic that you won’t know the reaction to. It’s important to make engagement as easy as possible for all types of team members.

• Create an anonymous form or Slack channel prior to the meeting to collect questions of interest from the team and share them in real time.
• Engage the team with tools like Slido that allow you to integrate Q+A, polls, and pop quizzes to help keep the audience engaged, prompting those who may have stayed quiet to voice their opinions and feedback more easily.

How do you share important information at different levels?

With even more written information to digest each day, it’s important to make sure there’s a dedicated space for employees to visit and find what they need. However, we still need to make room for other kinds of information to disseminate around the company, like celebrations or funny stories. How can we be sure the vital announcements aren’t buried among other news, but that the soft announcements can also be encouraged?

• Dedicate a Slack channel to announcements or #must_reads that come with new guidelines for engagement. It provides a singular place to reference changes to policy, processes or anything important, especially now at a time when these are changing often.
• Use Biteable, a video creation software to create exciting, engaging and on-brand videos as a channel for exciting announcements and company-wide updates.
• Create a separate channel for wins and celebrations. Automate these through Zapier or dedicate someone to announce them regularly. Sales wins, support wins, and success wins can all live here and be celebrated.

How do you, as a leader, check-in and make yourself available?

A good leader is available, even when they are not. They’re running in and out of meetings all day but they find the time to prioritize the team. Typically, seeing you at your desk is enough to let your team know that you’re approachable and around. That’s harder to do when remote, of course, and being listed ‘online’ is not enough. It’s important to find ways to make your team aware of your availability to support them at all (or most) times.

• Commit to over-communication. Use your chat tool status very well. Be clear about when you’re in a meeting, stepping away or open for questions. Connect an emoji or status to something relatable from the time you were in the office. For example, 📊 might mean I’m working through some data and spreadsheets and it’s best (if not urgent) to wait until I’m done.
• Use Lattice and their weekly update functionality to encourage your team to check-in with you. In doing so, it forces them to take a moment to check in on themselves, too. I make a quick 2–3 question survey that gives my team a chance to reflect on their weeks and how I may be able to help them. I typically change the question each week to something relevant, topical, or random to keep it fresh.

How do you create a virtual environment for innovation and ideas?

There’s something about being in a room with your teammates while you discuss, disagree and align on decisions that make the environment perfect for collaboration. You can read the energy in the room, write stuff down on whiteboards and explain concepts with your hands. How do you create that energy and space virtually? How do you encourage it?

• Create designated virtual “rooms” for free-for-all brainstorming sessions. I’d recommend a moderator to help keep everyone on track, but it’s not necessary to have someone running the meeting. Encourage the team to come prepared (if interested) with ideas, proposed solutions or thoughts they may have regarding the subject in any capacity. Keep these light, and remember, no idea is a bad idea!
• Use Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard platform, to work collaboratively on ideas or thoughts as a team. This can also be used for feedback, or team-building activities in monthly meetings or all-hands.

How do you help your employees around the world feel connected and committed?

It goes without saying, the sense of community, commitment and passion that is alive within an office space every day can get lost over the internet. You want to make sure your company culture can be felt through the screen, too.

• Define your remote culture in a guidebook full of declarations, corny 10 commandments, or whatever you want to call it. Create documentation that lays out and represents what successful remote collaboration looks like at your company. Define Slack etiquette, channel purposes, and conferencing protocol regarding video and audio. Create branded virtual backgrounds, decide on meeting guidelines, make all calendar events public, and be very clear whether anyone can join the dog channel, or if it’s just for people with dogs. Small traditions or “inside jokes” can bond people quickly, regardless of their location.

Not only is this helpful to establish boundaries and protocols for a new remote lifestyle, but will help new employees adapt easily. Often, new hires are assigned a team member to show them the ropes (which is still helpful while remote), but this guide can help answer a lot of simple questions about company culture and communications etiquette from the jump.

• Come up with nuances that are unique to your company that can include every employee. If you have the budget, consider a swag send! If not, recurring team events or traditions can bring people together regardless of their location. Think about things (serious or silly) that can help define the culture you want and how to encourage people to be a part of it.

In conclusion…

If you’re going to take the fully-remote workplace plunge, make it more than a virtual version of what you previously had. Lay the foundation for what’s most important for your company and the personalities you hire to create your team. Set them up for success by choosing a flexible path and sticking to it until it’s time to change course. Care, connect, over-communicate and commit.