9-Steps & Ideas For Building A Strong Remote Work Culture

Remote work culture, like other cultures, can be something you only truly understand if you get it.

Do you get it?

Do you want to know if you get it…or maybe figure out how to get it?

We designed this definitive guide to help you become a virtual work culture guru.

Who Would You Like To Give Gifts To?

Clients & Customers Employees

Page Contents (Click To Jump)

What Is Remote Work Culture?

Before we answer that question, let’s define culture by itself.

Just some of Merriam-Webster’s definition options include:

“The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”

“The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.”

“The set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic.”

You can feel fully connected to geek culture, popular culture, or maybe the Italian culture of your grandparents without spending time with every adherent on a regular basis.

Remote work culture is an unconditional feeling of connection co-workers experience when they’re bonded by similar priorities, interests, and attitudes.

This feeling of connection survives when people don’t see each other on a regular basis. Strong work cultures give people an unshakable sense of belonging.

Note: Your company’s remote work culture could be the same as your traditional work culture, but it might also look radically different. Pinpoint the difference by subtracting any element of your culture tied to physical space. What do you have left?

If your employees love to gather for impromptu dance parties or wear matching outfits one Friday a month, then you’ll need to pinpoint the underlying appeal and recreate it virtually.

Why Is Remote Work Culture Important?

Most people intuitively understand how shared values might lead to specific benefits. Those same people might also wonder how to articulate the specific benefits. Here are just a few.

Remote work culture counteracts remote isolation.

Buffer’s State of Remote Work Survey established “loneliness” as the second biggest struggle with working remotely. A strong remote work culture unites workers around a shared sense of purpose. This produces feelings of camaraderie and also leads to real actions—such as casual check-ins—that counteract isolation.

Remote work culture primes your company for future success.

Partial or complete remote work could be the new normal. A recent Gartner survey found that 74% of responding chief financial officers will be moving some employees to fully remote status if and when physical distancing measures relax after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Companies who build cultures to withstand the challenges inherent to remote work will skip the growing pains of shifting work models, maintaining productivity as trends change.

Remote work culture helps build long-term relationships.

Consider bolstering your remote work culture a win, even if your company returns to fully onsite work. Strong remote work culture is a strong culture—period. Strengthening team bonds to work remotely will also benefit onsite work by deepening relationships, building trust, and enhancing communication.

10 Tools & Ideas To Help You Build A Strong Remote Work Culture

1) Awardco

Awardco offers a peer-to-peer recognition hub that helps employees give each other shout outs and rewards. Remote employees can put a smile on anyone’s face in just a few clicks.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

Casual recognition, such as nods, high-fives, and mini applauses, happen in onsite offices all the time. These small events feed rapport. Awardco helps virtual teams create remote work cultures filled with the same kinds of small, yet satisfying, everyday recognitions.

How it could save you time:

You don’t have to develop and pass out tokens employees can use to recognize one another. The platform comes equipped with badges and culture rewards that enable fast online distribution.

2) Kazoo

Designed to help people pursue career goals and dreams, the Kazoo recognition platform helps employees use the recognition and assessment they receive to measure their overall progress.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

This remote work software helps employees stay connected to fulfilling work goals and desires that have nothing to do with physical space. Motivated and driven to pursue goals they can now track on a daily basis, remote employees naturally feel more connected to company missions.

How it could save you time:

Kazoo’s goal-integrated platform saves you tons of time on paperwork. With employee goals and milestones at your fingertips, you can quickly and easily get a big-picture look at employee progress and success.

3) monday.com

monday.com provides a virtual environment remote workers can use to engage, collaborate, and communicate as though they were in a physical office.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

monday.com makes it easy for remote employees to visualize, organize, and complete their work. It makes working remotely more streamlined and enjoyable, something you need before you can hope to scale a remote culture.

How it could save you time:

It takes the burden of facilitating remote employee communication away from one team. monday.com provides the tools and the virtual space, and employees need no help or instruction before diving right in.

4) Quizbreaker

Use Quizbreaker to build and distribute quizzes that are perfect for virtual team building and virtual team bonding.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

Each quiz isn’t just fun for everyone to take. As people answer questions, they’re also learning about co-workers, gaining the kind of knowledge and understanding that helps remote culture thrive.

How it could save you time:

You might not have to spend a lot of time in “stealth mode” every time someone’s birthday comes up. If you participate in these quizzes, you might already know what kind of cake everyone prefers and what kind of presents they’re likely to enjoy.

5) Nectar

Nectar makes it easier than ever to foster collaboration and connection across remote teams through recognition and rewards.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

One of the challenges of remote work is building camaraderie and connection across individuals and teams – something that’s significantly easier when everyone works from the same office. Nectar fills that void by creating a fun, collaborative space where people can celebrate great everyday work that often goes unnoticed.

How it could save you time:

Giving out gift cards or company swag as reward options is especially burdensome for organizations with a remote workforce. You and your HR team shouldn’t feel like you’re running an E-commerce store. Not only does Nectar offer digital gift cards that are sent instantly, the platform also provides on-demand swag management. No more bulk swag orders, storage closets full of old t-shirts or having to ship swag to people all over the country. Instead, the swag is made as it’s ordered and shipped directly to the employee’s doorstep without you having to lift a finger. Talk about a time save!

6) Bonusly

Bonusly is a recognition platform that makes it easy to virtually reward and celebrate peers and employees.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

It makes online recognition fast and fun, therefore it’s more likely to happen on all levels. This makes everyone feel seen, appreciated and connected.

How it could save you time:

You don’t have to spend time developing recognition plans, figuring out all the details of execution, or relaying the details to employees. Everything happens organically right within the platform.

7) Go Game

The event planning experts at the Go Game will set up virtual game shows, happy hours, and conferences that help your team members bond from any location.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

Remote teams that have fun together stay together. The Go Game helps everyone on the team have fun and also makes sure no single team has to shoulder the burden of planning events everyone will love.

How it could save you time:

Enjoy tons of fun events without spending more than a second on the planning or logistics side.

8) Assembly

Assembly makes employee recognition easy by providing a consolidated solution to support all things recognition, rewards, and corporate perks.

How it strengthens your remote work culture

Assembly gives remote employees somewhere to go when they need a morale boost or are looking to feel a little more connected to the rest of the team.

The streamlined program makes it near-effortless to give a meaningful “thank you”, and the public social feed lets other team members see all the great things their peers have accomplished. When you’re trying to support remote culture and keep the team engaged, having this kind of company-wide insight into team wins is key.

How it could save you time

To start, Assembly saves you time by streamlining the process of delivering recognition and rewards via an easy-to-use platform. It also comes with a few extra features that can save you even more time.

Pre-negotiated discounts and curated rewards
Automated work anniversaries and birthdays
Useful analytics based on your unique program data

Having one platform like Assembly that supports all of these things simultaneously adds up to a pretty significant amount of time saved. With all those manual processes off their plate, your HR team will be free to put their time into other culture-building initiatives that support your remote workforce.

9) Slack

Slack brings casual instant messaging, collaborative channels, and tons of other communication tools into your office.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

Slack enables remote employees to communicate with one another instantly. You don’t need to know their phone number or email address to shoot them a message or even just to say “hi.”

How it could save you time:

A casual communication tool like Slack could significantly reduce the time teams spending writing emails and attending meetings that could be transitioned into Slack channel formats.

10) GooseChase

Create exceptional and fun experiences for your remote team, wherever they are in the world! GooseChase is a scavenger hunt vendor that brings teams together to compete in scavenger hunt-like games to make a lasting impact on company culture and retention.

How it strengthens your remote work culture:

GooseChase helps unite your team by giving employees a space to show off their personalities, capabilities, and creativity. The friendly competition will keep your colleagues engaged and build culture and camaraderie. Curate games with missions centered around learning company values, to onboard them onto new processes, or to simply bond and have fun.

How it could save you time:

The intuitive platform makes it easy to create, reuse, share, and co-manage games – save even more time by pulling ideas from GooseChase’s bank of pre-created missions. It’s also simple to download player submissions (photos, videos, etc.) for you to share internally. With the reporting dashboard you can measure employee engagement and review individual submissions for compliance, for example, reviewing videos of the team practicing sales calls against your prescribed scripts.

How Do You Improve The Culture Of A Virtual Team?

Follow these steps to build a strong remote work culture. We’ve used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a psychological theory that tiers human requirements and desires, to order the steps. This structure will help you fulfill essential remote work needs before striving for actualization.

Basic Needs: Meeting Functional Requirements

Step 1 – Make sure employees have everything they need to work remotely

Some essentials include:

Reliable internet connection
Dedicated space for working
Phone
Computer
Printer
Router
Office supplies
Desk
Desk chair

If you find many employees lack these essentials, try carving out a budget for remote setup. If you don’t have the budget, then help employees create a realistic plan for checking off all their essentials.

Find more tips on getting employees set up in our remote onboarding checklist.

Step 2 – Establish remote work policies, expectations, and guidelines

This documentation should address some common questions employees have about remote work.

Scheduling. Do you expect employees to work fixed hours or will you be flexible? Will you encourage or discourage employees from checking messages outside of “regular business hours?”

Communication and collaboration. What are the communication channels of record? How often should employees plan virtual meetings with their teams?

Vacation and time off. May employees travel while working remotely as long as they meet key deadlines? Does the time-off request process work the same way?

Step 3 – Communicate the policies, expectations, and guidelines and solicit feedback and questions

Distribute your documentation across your company’s favorite communication channels.

Post everything on your company intranet or web content management system so employees can reference key points again and again.

Create a survey that employees can use to provide feedback on your policies and ask questions.

Emotional Needs: Fulfilling Desires for Esteem and Belonging

Step 4 – Create a remote culture statement

Take a look at your current culture statement. Chances are, it already works perfectly as a remote culture statement. Just check it for terminology people might associate with physical spaces, such as “happy hour,” “game rooms,” or “office pets.”

If you don’t already have a culture statement, create one by…

Making a list of values and interests your employees share

Explaining how your company helps nurture those values

Step 5 – Build an events calendar

Create a calendar (for the year or at least a quarter) filled with all-hands meetings, town-halls, virtual events, and other gatherings. This gives employees working from home a firm sense of time and connection to other employees.

Include any in-person gatherings on the planning books. Knowing when and where they can see their colleagues again helps remote workers power through feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Step 6 – Start a mentorship program or buddy system

Regular contact with even just one trusted friend or mentor can do wonders for a remote employee’s sense of belonging.

Remote work models mean you can even pair employees from different offices in different locations. This significantly expands the reach of your company’s network of close relationships, giving everyone a chance to understand different teams and maybe even share different skills.

Aspirational Goals: Strive for Creativity and Fulfillment

Step 7 – Establish unique traditions

Anyone who came from a family, school, or group of friends with a one-of-a-kind tradition knows how even small acts can create a sense of unity. (Once you’ve participated in a relay race while balancing a teacup on your head, you’re part of the group forever.)

Adding beloved traditions to an already strong culture can make employees feel like fulfilled members of a tight-knit community.

SnackNation employees have moved their beloved “Crush-It” call to a remote format that actually enhances certain aspects of the event. As employees share their “crush” (a colleague they want to recognize for outstanding work), everyone else can buzz and bond via online chat without interrupting their peers.

Step 8 – Integrate remote cultural principles into other areas of your business

Sit down with different teams to discuss ways to get your remote culture more deeply ingrained in your business. For example, you could…

Talk to your human resources or recruiting team about adding interview questions that screen prospective employees for culture fit.

Ask managers to rate employees’ embodiment of cultural values during annual reviews.

Send communications teams small reminders and culture quotes to work into emails and newsletters.

Step 9 – Help employees establish remote growth and development plans

Whether you work at a company that had a work-from-home policy before the COVID-19 pandemic or one that switched gears in the days of physical distancing, many of your employees may still be envisioning their career growth in traditional office terms.

Some aspects of career growth might even be symbolized by features of a physical office. (Moving from a row of desks into a swanky corner office, for example.)

Help, or have managers help, employees map out their desired career trajectory in a remote work environment. What steps do they need to take to advance? What skills should they work on?

To be truly fulfilled, employees must be able to envision where they’re headed and also like what they see.