How do we create a genuine culture on a remote team?
How do we create a genuine culture on a remote team without happy hour type get-togethers?
Team members keep mentioning their desire for more connections with colleagues but then don’t attend the social events. What do I do?
Building culture is not as related to social events as most people believe. Culture comes more from how you work than social events like happy hours.
When you were working in person, if the office had a micromanagement work style where you were regularly overworked, the after-work happy hour events didn’t change the culture of how the first 8 hours made you feel.
People don’t want to hear this (because it’s not as simple as scheduling a virtual social event), but if your workplace doesn’t have clear values, no amount of social Zoom calls will create a genuine culture.
There are three types of distance when it comes to remote work:
- Physical — Place and time
- Operational — Bandwidth and skill level
- Affinity — Values, Trust, and Interdependency
Typical companies focus only on the first two. The key difference in remote companies with fantastic cultures is they focus on affinity distance first, then operational and physical. Ask yourself:
- How does the company differentiate itself?
- What does the company value?
- How does the company value their team members?
The answers to these questions serve as the foundation to great culture. Building affinity requires a focus on trust, transparency, and autonomy/alignment. Once you have this established in the work itself, you can then extract key elements to design effective culture-building activities.
Here are some examples:
Groove HQ has intentionally built a culture with a strong emphasis on experimentation. This value was designed into their hiring and day-to-day work style. Because it is ingrained in how they work, they can now use it in non-work activities to build their culture even further.
So they started a 30-day challenge. Team members opt-in at the beginning of the month and then check in with a quick daily message in Slack. One team member noted, “It may sound a bit odd, but right away, it felt energizing. Like we had just developed a deeper relationship across the team in a matter of hours.”
Another example is Buffer, who has built a strong culture emphasizing self-improvement. So, each week, they share the personal improvement goals they’re working on:
Personalized activities like this are much more effective at building genuine culture than generic social Zoom calls. Look at the unique variables in how you work, then design uncommon connection activities (or “social zingers” as I like to call them) to ingrain those values even deeper into the culture.
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