How to maintain a remote work culture: 5 tips to keep you going

The traditional office landscape is changing - and with this new way of work, new challenges are arising.

One of these challenges is building a positive culture when your entire team is working remotely. How can you, as a leader, foster a solid culture when your team is working from home or distributed across the globe?

How can leaders ensure their teams are still developing needed communication skills and strong bonds with each other?

This article tackles several ways to build a solid remote work culture when working from home or across time zones.

1. Building trust 

The first step in establishing a remote work culture is to create a climate of trust, where people can take risks and be vulnerable. Undoubtedly, trust and psychological safety are a huge part of what makes a healthy company culture.

But why is it so important?

This foundation’s benefits are vast when you consider how it affects stress, engagement, and performance.

Establishing a psychologically safe workplace is the first step when building a solid company culture and should be an ongoing effort rather than a one-time activity. 

Fostering an environment of trust and psychological safety helps businesses attract and retain talent and increases employees’ sense of engagement and overall performance.

A psychologically safe work environment creates a culture that fosters innovation, productivity, and creativity.

A trust culture enables individuals to connect meaningfully with colleagues, customers, partners, friends, and anyone they meet along their journey.

“Emotionally connected teams can be vulnerable with one another because there is a baseline of safety and trust in the relationship. This means they’re more willing to share that crazy idea or push back when they see something they disagree with.” 

Jesse James Garrett, Chief Creative Officer at Adaptive Path

2. Communicate goals clearly

Whether you have a big team or a small one, it’s essential to communicate your overall goals and mission. It’s much easier to create a high-performing remote culture if everyone on the team understands the company’s vision.

Settle on a clear and concise way of describing that mission, communicate it to your teams, and continue to reinforce it. This reminds people of the importance of what they’re accomplishing together.

Review the company’s mission and goals regularly with your team members to make sure they’re the same in everyone’s mind.

Communicate them clearly and simply, and take ten minutes every day to remind people what you’re building.

Once everyone has a transparent mental model of what you’re trying to create together, it will be easier for people to stay focused on the more challenging parts of remote work.

3. Get regular feedback

Make an effort to gather constant feedback from your remote employees.

Like a thermostat, ask your employees frequently whether you’re doing the right job of managing, hiring, and maintaining the right people in remote positions and ensure that your employees are happy to work for you.

Ask each remote employee to pay close attention to the processes and the systems and encourage them to tell you what works and what doesn’t.

This will allow you to build better working systems in the future.

4. Practice agile, flexible, and just leadership 

So how can you nurture team collaboration in an ‘officeless’ environment?

Influential leaders know that agile decision-making has a high priority. Making decisions quickly and getting everyone on the same page is crucial for managers to ensure a smoothly operating remote work team.

Tenacious, collaborative people who can work well with others are your best bets for being productive. Also, being flexible is essential since everything is changing all the time rapidly. 

Lastly, being a just and inspiring leader while setting goals and keeping business on track is not easy.

According to the article written by Sid Sijbrandij on Wired, working in a hybrid model would cause unfair competition between remote and in-office employees.

It can be challenging for executives to maintain objective relationships between team members working from home and working from the office.

Being open to change, creating shared leadership, encouraging secure connections between employees, defining core values, setting personal or team goals are essential specifications of a remote team leader.

5. Use platforms to increase productivity

Remote work productivity is the expected outcome of building a remote work culture.

It’s good that countless tools and platforms can enable you to create a better work culture while increasing productivity and efficiency.

Companies can reduce the expenses needed to run their business without the standard overhead that comes with an office.

However, if these companies want to build a remote work culture, they must use some platforms to make their employee’s life easy and build better connections between teams to enable them to get things done remotely.

Making payment processes more secure and easy or using a platform that can help employees connect efficiently is crucial.

Using these tools from home will facilitate smooth connection and communication and enable you to get things done at ease.