6 tips to build and sustain a remote work style 6 tips to build and sustain a remote work culture

In the past few years, remote working has become commonplace. Organisations have explored different methods to keep teams connected and empowered with tools and processes for them to perform their best.

However, it's not always simple for workers. A typical day of remote work may involve wading in a sea of emails across channels, training the new employee, giving comments on projects, and scheduling in time for intense work amid meeting marathons and at-home priorities.

It's not easy to stay engaged and productive when you live in a world that is not connected. The big issue is: how do you prepare your employees to succeed in a dispersed and dispersed world?

We talked with 's Chief People Officer Crystal Boysen, to get her thoughts on how she works with remote work. If you're only beginning your enterprise-scale remote journey, we have a quick introduction to remote work with tips on how to create a welcoming and productive environment with videos.

What is remote working?

The remote-first office allows employees to fulfill their tasks from their homes, not in a corporate office. Remote firms may ask certain employees to come into the office (depending of their job), but allow freedom for other employees.

Before 2020, remote work was typically reserved for freelancers, small business owners or even the uncommon digital nomad. However, that has been changing in recent years. There are now more than 45 percent of full-time staff across the United States working from home at least some of the day in 2021 according to Gallup study. Now that office spaces are re-opening, those same employees aren't ready to leave According to a Gallup survey, 9 out of 10 remote workers want to be at least partially at a distance in the coming years.

Of course, since 's team is comprised of remote and hybrid employees, our workspace still remains completely remote-first.

How to build a remote work culture

1. Audit your existing work processes

The first step to build a remote work culture is taking a thorough, hard look at your existing systems and procedures. You should ask yourself:

• What does your company's decision-making structures look like?
• What are the ways teams can be responsible for their goals?
• Who are the people who are honored?
• What can you do to ensure information moving throughout the company?
• Where do employees find the details that they require?

In many ways, switching to remote work can reveal the weaknesses of your methods. Once you've analyzed what systems in your business operates it is possible to identify areas which you can work to fix.
In this case, you might find that going remote can help teams create more efficient organizational documents and use the same decision-making process.

2. Establish rules of engagement

The best cultures aren't created by chance, so make sure to plan the goals you'd like the culture of your remote workplace to look like. At , we really prize flexibility and inclusion, so we've set up rules of participation that are reflective of that.

In terms of flexibility, Boysen says, created roles that are hybrid as well as remote that let employees work the way that they do best. According to surveys, employees have said they enjoy things like more time during the day to be with family or getting children prepared to go back to the school day. The ability to avoid the commute every day improved the quality of their lives. And since it's important at for employees to feel well as individuals, and not only employees, this flexibility became really important to our remote work culture.

It is also a part of our rules of engagement. In a hybrid environment it's simple for remote workers to not feel valued, therefore, establishing rules to make sure everyone feels valued and included is important.

If, for instance, there's an occasion for a gathering of any sort and all office employees are present, they are encouraged to join a video call via laptops or laptops in separate rooms. This ensures that distant employees aren't left out of group conversations.

Because remote work can so easily bleed into people's home lives, it's also helpful to establish rules that can allow employees to establish boundaries for their working. This could mean a company-wide meeting-free afternoons to combat Zoom fatigue and let people concentrate on work. Employees are also able to set their agendas to have all meetings end within 10 minutes of the hour in order to make sure that nobody has to attend multiple meetings at once.

3. Consider investing in tools that allow remote collaboration

To work well when working from afar, workers need to be able communicate with each other at the same time from their homes like they would in an office. That requires specialized tools that encourage deliberate collaboration.

To collaborate across teams in other ways it is possible to use a chat program (Slack) and a video call provider (Zoom). We utilize an online whiteboard software, Miro, that allows teams to collaborate and brainstorm on projects asynchronously. We've also invested in a platform which allows us to communicate our objectives, goals, and key results. This way, we'll be all in agreement on the priorities and be sure that we're working towards the same goals.

4. Make sure you are focusing on communicating

There is so much communication happening throughout working hours in an workplace, so it's important not to lose that when you go remote. This might not seem sexy or cool, but improving your asynchronous communication and documenting game is crucial when building a remote culture.

Naturally, the other side of communication is documentation. We also discovered that we must be really good at documenting everything including meeting minutes to project updates to making decisions. We revamped our intranet's website, making it easier for everybody to find and access all the data they require.

5. Learn to train leaders in managing teams remotely

What we've learned is that managing remote teams requires special skills than managing teams on the ground. When we first moved into a culture of remote working our management team were struggling with the change as we realized that it was necessary to take more steps to assist the managers.

Playbooks can cover the various aspects of running the team remotely, such as how to establish a good example of communicating boundaries, the best way to conduct effective remote meetings, as well as what proper email etiquette looks as.

The go-to-guide for virtual trainings

Give your people leaders as well as managers the tools they need to help their team members around the world using video.

6. Make connections and collaboration a priority.

After polling their employees following transitioning to a remote working culture, the number one factor they felt they were missing was a feeling of connection to their colleagues. The personal connection and community that you can foster fairly easily in the office needs much more intentionality when everyone is remote.

That required finding ways to bring folks together. There were a lot of thoughts for new methods to connect remotely for example:

• The #CoffeeDate channel is now live in our Slack, which brings together coworkers every month to meet for 30 minutes, virtual coffee dates.
• Creating a #ShoutOut channel in Slack where employees can give praise to everyone in the organization.
• Teams should be given budgets to fund online team-building activities, such as trivia nights or classes in art.
• New hires are required to create video clips of themselves introducing themselves. These will be shared with all employees.

Develop an inclusive, engaged and adaptable remote culture.

If you've traditionally operated as an office culture, it's difficult for you to change to a remote-first work model. With a bit of planning and dedication, you can build an environment that supports all of your employees -- no matter the location they connect to.