Would you like your employees to feel 3.7 times more engaged in their work (Gallup)? Help them connect with the company culture. While it may seem trivial at first sight, a strong culture can improve loyalty, retention, and make professionals feel seen and appreciated. The challenge is that you can’t copy and paste office traditions into a remote setting, as it will likely fall flat online. There’s no universal recipe for remote team culture, and in most cases, you have to build it from scratch.
So, where do managers begin? Most importantly, how to create a sense of belonging in the workplace? This article aims to answer.
What Is Remote Team Culture?
Remote team culture is the set of shared values and rituals that shape how team members work, communicate, and collaborate with each other. It defines what the company prioritizes, how it makes decisions, and shows trust in its employees, as well as what environment it strives to create.
Example: GitLab has created a public handbook that documents everything from company values to meeting etiquette. It provides details and clear guidelines, making it easy to follow.
How to Build a Remote Team Culture
Enough with the definitions. It is time we discuss how to build a strong culture with a remote team and ensure it works in practice. I have prepared 6 core steps with a brief description and examples, so you know exactly what you need to do and how.
Define Shared Values and Vision
The values you choose will serve as the compass of your remote company culture. Try to ground yours by linking them to daily work cases, and explain how exactly the company sees their implementation. If the values only exist on a Notion page or Slack channels, they will likely lead to confusion, so be as precise as possible.
Tip: Instead of saying “we value ownership,” clarify what it means. For example, “If you face [Name of the Issue], document it in [Tool Name] within [Period of Time].”
Establish Transparent Communication
Transparency in communication and internal processes helps managers build trust and minimize misunderstandings. Create specific rules of engagement for your team: project updates are discussed during Zoom meetings, and product-related questions go to Slack. This will help to avoid messy communication and ensure employees know how to stay connected when working remotely.
Encourage Feedback and Recognition
Open feedback and recognition are key to improving team motivation and morale. Encourage managers to communicate with employees regularly, instead of waiting for the performance review season. Otherwise, professionals risk missing important feedback or getting it too late, when the negative impact is irreversible.
Example: Create a weekly gratitude thread where employees can share how their colleagues helped them. Encourage them to reward each other with tacos that Slack offers.
Create Rituals and Team Traditions
Small rituals and local traditions help turn a group of offline strangers into a community, making them another element of remote work culture. The best thing about these? They do not have to be big to work. Introduce lightweight traditions such as “Weekly Wins,” playlist swaps, or virtual coffee breaks. These rituals can bring an element of fun to busy workdays and increase employee engagement.
Support Work-Life Balance
More than 65% of employees are likely to stay with the company if it supports their work-life balance (SHRM). For online professionals who often suffer from blurred boundaries, it is a must-have element of remote team culture. How do you maintain it?
Encourage your specialists to define and defend their boundaries, and try to model them as a leader. Respect working hours and do not send late-night messages unless you have something urgent to share.
Use Tools to Improve Collaboration
Technology is the backbone of remote teamwork. However, that’s when the problem appears: too many tools often create chaos. As a result, instead of increasing productivity, managers prevent employees from working by using too many apps.
Tip: Regularly check the software your team uses. If two platforms overlap, consolidate. Ask for honest feedback in employee surveys and remove tools that fail to meet their needs.
What are the Challenges of Remote Work Culture?
Working with a remote team has its ups and downs. On one hand, there’s complete flexibility and space for each professional to master time management and independence. On the other hand, there’s a chance teammates will grow distant and lose their communication skills. Surely, these are just the top items in the list. I suggest that we stop second-guessing and review the challenges in detail.
Lack of Belonging and Isolation
Remote employees often feel isolated, as if they are working by themselves. In some of the cases, they technically are: while offices are full of colleagues running around, the work-from-home environment is rather quiet. Without in-person interactions, the only thing that’s left is a strong remote team culture. Otherwise, a sense of isolation strengthens, and professionals feel disconnected and unproductive.
Around 25% of remote workers report feeling lonely, compared to 16% of office employees (Gallup).
No Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life
Be honest: Did you ever reply to a work message out of your hours? Do you know someone who did? I do. Blurred boundaries between work and life are one of the overlooked challenges of the remote working culture. Professionals often feel tempted to respond since a laptop or a phone is right next to them. However, these small actions often lead to stress, burnout, and even health issues. Unlike office culture, where leaving the building signals the end of the day, work-from-home employees struggle to switch off.
Low Employee Engagement Levels
Another downside of the remote team culture is disengagement. In an office, it is easy to notice. For example, employees show up late, withdraw from calls, or stop participating in team activities. However, the work-from-home situation is different: people can complete tasks and respond to Slack messages, yet feel completely disconnected.
Studies show that your “team work-from-home” is likely to experience negative emotions, such as stress (45%), anger (25%), and sadness (30%) (Gallup). A strong and supportive culture can minimize these risks and bring more positivity to the workplace.
Misalignment of Values and Goals
When employees do not share an understanding of company values, decisions become inconsistent. Some professionals prioritize speed, while others focus on collaboration and empathy. In an office, values are often reinforced daily by leadership’s behavior during business meetings or team-building activities. Remotely, they may feel vague and unrealistic.
Benefits of a Strong Remote Work Culture
Now that you know the “how-tos” and challenges that await you, we can move to a positive aspect of this article: the top 3 benefits of a strong remote work culture.
Improved Employee Retention and Loyalty
Remote employees who feel a connection to the organization’s values are more likely to stay. Why? The sense of belonging and personal impact increases, and work no longer feels like a burden. When professionals know the company lives by its rituals, they feel recognized as part of something bigger.
This sense of consistency and authenticity fosters trust, which is critical in a remote work environment where employees can’t rely on office perks.
Increased Employee Productivity
Another benefit of remote team culture is increased productivity. When values, rituals, and communication norms are clear, professionals waste less time guessing. They know what’s expected of them and how their work is connected to the bigger picture.
As a result, employees focus on actual tasks and have a clear understanding of the next steps and goals.
Attraction of the Global Talents
Remote teamwork opens the company to various locations, but it is the culture that makes the best candidates say “yes.” Professionals do not just assess their monthly pay. Instead, they evaluate whether the future company ensures inclusion, support, and alignment with their lifestyle. It is about finding the culture fit.
When candidates see an organization that values its employees, they are more likely to choose it among the offers of your competitors.
Best Practices for Leading Remote Teams
If you have made it to this section, you know the steps, challenges, and benefits of values. Now it is time you discover how to build culture in a remote team effectively. To ease the task for you, I have selected the best 4 practices that will help you move in the right direction. Let’s take a closer look at them:
- Set asynchronous work as the default: Remote success lies in asynchronous communication. Share meeting minutes, updates, and video recordings so employees can contribute, regardless of their schedule or time zone.
- Link connection & spirit rituals to real cases: Small rituals bring an element of fun to the workplace and help maintain positive energy. Create threads for daily wins, employee resource groups, or crisis support. Ensure these traditions are tied to something people can relate to, cases they face in their daily lives, to make them more realistic.
- Measure engagement proactively: Performance reviews and promotions are not the only times to measure employee engagement. Instead, I recommend running regular one-on-one calls, creating employee surveys, and tracking activity using direct reports.
- Create cultural boundaries: What’s a remote team culture without boundaries? Protect your employees from burnout by helping them maintain a healthy work-life balance.
These tips are simple yet effective ways to make your remote company culture work for all employees.
Tools That Support Remote Culture
Surely, the tips above aren’t the only way to support your professionals. These days, sharing knowledge and boosting team morale is not as complicated as it used to be, thanks to the variety of tools.
Traditionally, this section focuses on the best apps for remote specialists that can positively impact workflow structure and collaboration.
Best Meeting Assistant: Sembly AI
Would you like to monitor employee sentiment and keep track of all team meetings? Sembly AI makes this possible. Unlike traditional note-taking apps that primarily focus on transcriptions, Sembly listens to your conversations to provide you with smart insights, key items, and tasks. Furthermore, it can detect negative sentiment, track employee engagement across meetings, and generate reports within minutes.
Let’s examine how it works in practice:
- Open the “My AI Chat” tab within your account.
- Click the “New AI Chat” button in the upper-right corner.
- Enter: “Analyze [Employee Full Name] activity across all meetings. Create a report with sentiment analysis, details on cultural fit, and areas for improvement.”
- Enjoy the result!
Best Tool for Remote Collaboration: Slack
Slack is a corporate communication platform that replaces inefficient emails with fast messages. For many work-from-home professionals, it became an online office, and for managers, an answer to the “How to keep remote teams connected?” question. It is simple, intuitive, and packed with features, making it a good choice.
Here are a few ideas on how to use Slack to support your remote company culture:
- Create channels for informal communication: #gratitude, #weeklywins, #offtopsupport, #wellbeingtips.
- Use huddles for virtual team-building activities: Coffee breaks, team celebrations, and welcome parties.
- Add apps to add an element of fun: Reward the best ideas from employees with tacos, use surveys to get fresh opinions.
Best Tool for Employee Engagement: Cooleaf
Cooleaf is an employee engagement platform that gamifies recognition, feedback, and wellness initiatives. It is a good choice for organizations that need to create a sustainable remote team culture.
Here is how you can use the app to strengthen yours:
- Use peer-to-peer recognition programs to ensure contributions from your employees are visible and celebrated.
- Try challenges (from fitness to educational sprints) to increase employee engagement.
- Review analytics dashboards to get insights into morale trends and use them as an opportunity to act before disengagement spreads.
These hand-picked 3 tools give you an advantage in building a strong remote team culture. I have intentionally chosen apps that cover different aspects: communication, recognition, and alignment. With these up your sleeve, the work-from-home environment will no longer feel like a challenge left behind by the pandemic.
Wrapping Up
The remote team culture is sometimes the only thing that sets apart the unproductive work-from-home team from the productive and motivated one. While it feels complicated at first glance, since there is no personal contact, with the right tools and instructions, you have all the chances for success. The key? Ensure your values exist in your daily routine, not just in formal documentation. This way, employees can live by these rituals rather than just glancing at them during their onboarding.
In this article, I have tried to examine the ins and outs of remote work culture and find the answer to a key question: How to bring remote teams together? I hope you have got all the insights you need. Good luck!
FAQ
What is the difference between a remote work culture and an office culture?
Office culture usually develops through in-person interactions and relies on physical presence. Remote work culture, on the other hand, is created through documentation, rituals, and tools. It thrives on clarity, transparency, and collaboration; however, these require intention and consistency.
Does office culture work for work-from-home teams?
No. Office traditions can not fit into remote environments, as work conditions differ. Companies need to seek virtual alternatives that can replace in-person communication and make it work for remote employees.
For example, people often use Slack chats for informal conversations, virtual coffee breaks instead of lunchtime with colleagues, or async updates to replace quick office conversations for the entire company.
How to improve remote work culture in 4 steps?
- Define your values and translate them into real-life behaviors.
- Establish transparent communication norms.
- Recognize employees consistently with feedback tied to values.
- Create traditions and support work-life balance.
What are the best innovative ideas for remote working?
Here are the top 4 innovative ideas for remote working:
- Host Spotify playlist swaps where employees share music and choose the song of the day.
- Run workspace tours where team members show their home setups.
- Launch async learning clubs. For example, book summaries, podcasts, or mini-courses.
- Organize global virtual lunches, where each employee shares a dish from their region.
How to make remote employees feel connected?
An effective remote team culture is key to connecting people, regardless of their location. Here are the 5 core steps you need to take to create it:
- Define shared values and use them in practice.
- Set up communication channels and encourage employees to share their feedback and ideas.
- Create structured rituals and team traditions. For example, run virtual coffee chats and celebrate wins publicly.
- Support work-life balance and use the remote work reports to analyze the reality employees face.
- Encourage managers to hold regular 1:1s to monitor employees’ state of mind.
You can also use virtual collaboration software like Slack to facilitate employee communication, platforms like Cooleaf to help employees feel seen, and advanced AI meeting note-takers like Sembly to ensure that no one misses out on meeting context.
- Multi-meeting chats
- AI Insights
- AI Artifacts
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