The data about the effectiveness of letting people choose remote work if they want to is at this point overwhelmingly in favor of remote work. Yet, a lot of managers and organizations like to say “it’s better for the company culture” if people are in the office together. They can claim that because culture is inherently a word that has no specific definition, and while everyone has a general idea of what it means, ultimately it can’t be measured: this makes difficult to prove them wrong.

Yet, it’s also obviously wrong to anyone able to look beyond the short-sighted boundaries of old organizations. We have now decades of evidence how online communities exist, and they exist at every scale: from the small guild of friends that meet exclusively online to play to major cultural phenomena that travel across the whole planet. Remote culture can obviously thrive.

A quick primer on culture

While I don’t want to dive into a deep exploration on the meaning of culture, given the topic it’s also important to give it at least some scope, in a way that can be used effectively in organizations.

First of all, it’s important to realize that when we talk about “company culture” we don’t mean the general meaning of culture. That’s just too wide. We need something useful within the scope of an organization.

Lots can be said, but here’s a simple way to frame culture in an organization:

• People relationships — cuture need connections to spread
• Implicit and explicit shared knowledge — culture shares information (memes)
• Implicit and explicit shared beliefs and values — culture needs foundational principles to base itself on
• Implicit and explicit behaviours — culture is how people act and interact, not just information

It’s important the emphasis on both implicit and explicit: this is because there might be a major disconnection between the two (which is a problem), like a company that says they care about people but they then reduce their flexibility and doesn’t invest in them.

With this definition we can more clearly see what we can work on to support the creation and spread of it.

Building remote culture

Let’s start with a critical point: remote community and culture is different from office community and culture. I know it sounds like an obvious statement, but in my work as a remote consultant I often still find people going “but we used to have almost 100% participation in our “Friday Fun Hour” and now people barely show up. Yes, it’s because before they were captive in the office. Remote culture can’t be fostered in the same ways, even if some of foundational aspects are the same.

Remote also doesn’t have the decades (centuries?) of evolution of the office space in its favor, so we are still working in shaping these ideas. One of the main aspects is that offices are designed also to facilitate encounters and discussions — we can open a sad note on open spaces, but you get the point.

So going beyond the part of culture that is implicitly created by working together, remote culture needs to be curated more explicitly. In this sense there are many things to work with. The general advice is to frame everything as “experiments”, run them for a sensible amount of time to assess the success, run a retro, and then tweak, proceed, or dismiss. And on to the next.

Here are some ideas to play with:

1. Run “team forming” workshops where principles, values, and commitments are established by them. Of course you’ll be guiding this and writing the final copy, but the idea is that people feel part of the team and committed by having co-created the team foundation.
2. Be very explicit about distinguishing work time and time for socialization. Remote needs explicit socialization time, while in small offices this often happens naturally for the people filling the gap when they are not working.
3. Run a weekly meeting where you can check work and so on, but where there’s also some time for socialization (5-10 minutes).
4. Use some automation for “social” messages. This could be for example a Donut automation that runs a question every week. Adoption might not be great at the beginning, but sometimes builds up later (took one of my teams about 6 months before they started replying… now they reply every week).
5. Run a monthly “Connect” activity. This could be half an hour with some lightweight activity that makes people share who they are (like “Would you rather” questions, just make them work appropriate). Often this can just be general chat for people that are already well connected, or can have some guided activity.
6. Get people to connect 1:1. This can happen naturally through work, or might be through a tool like Donut again, but it also helps building some connections across the team. For example for me I’ve a Lead that is really good at socializing and I’ve nudged him to have regular 1:1s with everyone in the team. It’s been very effective to make everyone feel more connected as they are more comfortable when he’s around.
7. Create “surprise” one-offs (not surprise in the sense of sudden, but in the sense of non-regular). For example right now I’m planning a “get to know how I like working” activity with the team. We did it a while ago, but now it’s time to do it again. I’m going to shuffle its content tho: goal is the same, but with different structure and questions will be interesting for everyone (last one we also shared our “desktop photo” which then people talked about and it’s been great so replicating that likely).
8. Acknowledge neurodiversity. Not everyone likes video, not everyone likes writing, not everyone likes drawing. Mixing up type of activities would be great. For example at some point we had an activity where we created big boards in Miro with background photos taken of landscapes and interior spaces and people were asked to “decorate” them in groups, discussing what to do. It usually takes a turn for the fun/absurd, but it’s very open and allows for people to add cropped images from the web like a collage (excellent for people “not good at drawing”).
9. Organize meetups. Ideally, once a quarter or three times per year. Remote teams work better when they can meet in person a few times a year. The idea is dual: dedicate 50% of the time to some kind of socialization activity, and 50% of the time to work that is most effective in person (not any work, be focused and purposeful).

Note also that sometimes some people just… won’t be interested. That’s ok. It’s not that we are doing anything wrong. It’s just that people are people, that’s all. Even if it might feel difficult when we are doing it and we aren’t getting the expected response. In this case I often reach out and have that conversation: “Hey I noticed you aren’t much engaged… is there anything we can do to make these things interesting for you, or you’d rather stay on the side because that’s your preference? That’s ok either way, but it would help for me to know”.

All of this, also will start compounding. A short activity here, a recurring sharing there, a meetup, and over time things start happening. Don’t expect to do one “big” thing and call it done. It’s the compound contribution of a lot of small things… like bumping into each other during a coffee break.