You probably know how important it is for employee morale and long-term employee retention to build a positive company culture. And, you probably have a wheelhouse full of tools. But, what do you do when it comes to your remote teams?
It is possible to enhance your company culture remotely. It simply takes a bit of effort and ingenuity. In this article, we look at how startups can build a successful culture for remote teams.
Hire the Right Team
Your positive company culture starts when you do your due diligence and hire the right employees from the beginning. You want to look over the resumes, check references, and have a multi-layered interview process that involves other employees, so you hire people who are the best for your overall team. The right people make creating a natural team culture that much easier.
Define Your Company Values
Your remote teams need to know what your business stands for. What is your mission and vision? What values do you hold dear? Ultimately you want to put together a team that also shares your company values and will work within them.
Communicate Your Culture
Because your team is working remotely, it’s up to you to communicate the culture. Document it in writing and share this with your employees. It should be positive, inspirational, and well thought out. You want to specifically lay out your expectations for your team, explain how you measure performance, and tell your team how you’ll assess them. Because your team is remote, this document needs to be very specific.
Create Traditions
A positive culture resolves around things people look forward to. For example, plan a company-wide retreat once or twice a year. Schedule it somewhere your team looks forward to visiting. While you can and should do work-related things at your retreat, it should also be fun and energizing. This is the chance for your remote workers to get together and work as a team in-person. It also helps open the lines of communication and form bonds through trust.
Choose the Right Collaboration Tools
There are many apps and software available for remote teams. These will be key for your team so they can share documents, work together, and share information and ideas.
Consider a platform like Slack. This tool puts all of your communication in one place so your team can stay productive while working together remotely. Slack can also be the “break-room” your remote team uses. There can be friendly discussions and down-time in this app as well.
Open the Lines of Communication
Communication is another key aspect of building a successful culture for remote teams. You’ll want to set aside a regular time each week for everyone to chat together virtually, or at the very least, for you to chat with each employee. This replaces the traditional staff meeting and allows everyone to discuss what projects they’re working on, get updates, and share feedback. You’ll find this meeting is a great place for team bonding as well.
Final Thoughts
Geographic distances don’t have to hamper your company culture. Creating a positive culture for all of your employees, whether on-site or working remotely is the trait of successful businesses, and it’s possible for your company.
With remote teams, your business benefits from a higher productivity in its team members, increased happiness, flexibility, lower stress, and a reduced turnover rate.
You have to work to nurture this in your employees. A healthy culture is key to your success, and if you use the tips in this article, you’ll find you team members have a high employee morale from the exceptional company culture you cultivated.
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