Maintaining a company culture is vital for any business, but it can also be challenging – especially when the whole team is working remotely. With the right strategy, companies can keep their culture and perhaps even enrich it further despite being remote. In this article, we will list our best strategies that have helped us on our journey.
When we decided to go fully remote, it was very important for us to make sure that all our employees felt comfortable and could navigate in this new working environment. Of course, this comes with its own set of requirements. Below, we’ll list some of our best strategies when it comes to keeping the company culture when going fully remote, that can hopefully be helpful for other companies wishing to explore going remote in the future:
We are aware that what is working now might not work forever. It’s important to be open to feedback from employees regarding what’s working and not working, and be prepared to make important changes when needed and flexible enough to do so.
When employees feel that their needs and wishes are seen and heard, they are more likely to thrive in their respective roles and feel motivated. After all, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating the ideal working environment in our own homes. Before we went fully remote, we therefore talked to each of our employees individually to go through their individual needs and wishes for the workplace and went ahead and bought all the equipment that our employees needed to make sure that their home workspace felt comfortable and functional.
In a remote environment, open dialogue, building trust and staying connected is key. Leaders and employees need to be able to trust each other, communicate effectively and feel comfortable with expressing their opinions and individual needs. It’s also crucial to ensure that important information is being shared and that decision-making is transparent, so that the whole team can stay up to date and feel involved.
To make sure we’re all staying in contact, we made it our priority to implement technical tools that facilitate communication, both formal and informal conversations. For example, we stay in touch daily via Slack, and have set up Discord chat rooms where we can hang out and talk to each other. For example, we have a coffee room where our colleagues can share a coffee break and have a chat.
In order to keep the team spirit, we also meet up physically from time to time to boost engagement and increase the team-spirit. Three times a year, we rent a bigger house for a “workation”, where we engage in different activities, brainstorm ideas and have dinner together. We believe that many great ideas are born when we get to sit down and be creative together in person, and we didn’t want to risk losing this valuable in-person exchange when going remote.
Another way that we ensure our employees feel seen and heard is through regular 1 on 1 meetings and anonymous surveys. These are crucial to identify the challenges they might be facing in their roles and working environment and address them with appropriate solutions as early as possible. When working remotely, it’s also important to pick up signals of stress or mental health struggles from our colleagues to be able to offer them the support they need.
Sign up for our newsletter and get inspired by our customer stories, blogposts about work-life balance, planning and more!
