Team Culture
In a remote team, individuals will continue to observe and learn what the team culture truly is, but being explicit about it surely helps.
Culture can make or break a team. However, being an abstract concept, the need to build a strong team culture is often ignored. It usuallysignifies different things to each company, but at the core it is abunch of values, which are either explicitly defined or implicitlyfollowed, while working towards a specific goal. Culture generally hasvery little to do with an individual and is more about how a group ofpeople perform together.
While it is tough to generally infer the culture of team, it is easier in a co-located team. The way people totalk to one-another, their attire, the layout of the office, among awhole lot of other visual cues, give an individual a lot of inputs tounderstand the culture of the team. All of these cues are absent in aremote team.
Therefore, it becomes clearly more important to beintentional in building and communicating culture in a remote team. Even in a remote team, individuals will continue to observe and learn whatthe team culture truly is, but being explicit about it, surely helps.
It comes about in everything we do. How we communicate, either via Slack,in Discourse, in Email, or on Zoom calls. It comes about on ourretreats. It’s reflected in the decisions that are made, like sharing so much of Buffer’s processes and revenue transparently, etc.
- Hailley Griffis, Head Of Public Relations at Buffer
Let's delve into some ways that you can build culture in your team:
- Clarity in values
- Explicitly communicate it internally and publicly
- Hire right
- Encourage recognition
- Intentional vs. Organic initiatives
- Slack channels
- Team offsites
- Measure engagement
1. Clarity in values
While we spoke about the importance of documentation and to write down allaspects of work and different processes, it is also important to codifythe values that the company stands for. This should be one of the firstpieces that any new hire reads and understands clearly: the type ofworking style, interactions and attitude that is encouraged, as well asthe kind that is actively discouraged.
The document is meant tobe inspirational and at the same time extremely actionable. For eachvalue, draw in quotes from past events that epitomise it in a beautifulway. This signifies that the document isn't merely a formal note, but is highly reflective of what the company stands for.
Transparency is one of our values. We have a handbook that is publicly accessibly - if we printed it, it would 3000 pages.
- Darren Murph, Head of Remote at Gitlab
2. Explicitly communicate the team culture internally and publicly
However, mere documentation of your team's culture isn't enough. It should beregularly brought up in meetings, in communication from the topmanagement and from mentors to new hires. Commending & recognisingexemplary instances of individuals embodying the values of the companymotivates others to follow it too.
Further, be vocal about theteam's culture not only internally but also on public forums. Writeblogs on what your company believes in and also any new initiativestaken to promote such beliefs. Encourage even other people in the teamto write about their thoughts and experiences. Even if they write on atopic that suggests the need for internal improvement, it reflectspositively on the company - demonstrating transparency and the abilityto recognise areas that require development.
Such initiativeshelp employees to understand the culture of the firm not only frominternal communication but also from external sources. It alsoestablishes the company as a thought leader in the space, which has arub-off effect on the quality of talent applying to your firm. Thisnicely sets us up for the next point.
3. Hire right
Not every person would be a good fit for the culture of your team.Therefore, fit-checks need to be integrated into the hiring processitself. Hiring managers have an additional critical aspect to verifywhen vetting a person. This is very crucial - as discussed earlier, when working remotely it is important to trust your colleagues entirely andyou need to evaluate if that would be possible while hiring itself!
4. Encourage recognition
Publicly recognising the achievements of individuals is one of the best ways tobuild a positive working culture. Praising someone on a public channelon slack and allowing others to also give a pat, is a strong motivator.
In this context, Scott from Invision mentioned a tool called Bonusly, that allows team members to publicly award each other a nominal amount ofmoney, whenever they would like to express appreciation. At Invision,each individual is allocated with $25 a month, that can be used to award colleagues. This promotes the culture of appreciating one-another in avery organic fashion.
One tool that we use which isamazing and I would highly recommend to everybody is Bonusly - it isthis tool where you can literally give anywhere between a dollar to...we have a 25 dollars budget per month, so a dollar to 25 dollars, toanybody for anything. You can do it in slack natively and @ so & so + x dollars for doing xyz, #teamwork. It is this great little way to saythat you are thankful for something or give someone praise...You reallybuild rapport with the people that are giving these bonuses to, peoplesee them and you really feels good when you get one.
- Scott Hanford, Director of Customer Acquisition at Invision
5. Intentional vs. Organic initiatives
In our chat with Darren from Gitlab, he mentioned that teams need to beintentional in building culture. This includes initiatives to ensurethat team members interact with each other also outside of work-related conversations. To ensure such conversations actually happen, theyencourage people to have chats about life in general and about work,during work time.
...you need to weave things likecoffee chats, group social calls, team social calls, company calls. Youneed to weave that into the culture and carve out time company-wide tomake this a thing. So every week I spend time talking to people aboutlife not about work during work hours, because that is the only way tobuild relationships with people when you are all across the world.
- Darren Murph, Head of Remote at Gitlab
Scott from Invision, did appreciate the need to be intentional aboutdeveloping relationships, however, felt that such initatives could alsomake conversations quite awkward. He observed that initiatives that grew organically have done much better.
One organic method that hasworked for them has been to allocate 5-mins at the beginning of eachmeeting to just socialising. On the other hand, he found thatdeliberately organising group calls with people who are leaving thecompany, such as a "happy hour" call or so, were very awkward - as itwas just the one person whom everyone was attempting to talk to and each person waiting for their turn to do so!
...theother thing that we have done well on our team and other teams and havealways promoted internally at Invision as I think this is the mostorganic, best way to do it. The first 5 mins or so of any meeting arereligiously dedicated, whether it is 1-on-1s or a larger group, to justsocialising - shooting the sh*t on random things. And that's youropportunity to like be human about stuff.
- Scott Hanford, Director of Customer Acquisition at Invision
Shane, co-founder of Scrapinghub, mentioned that the crucial ingredient tosuccess was to ensure that such initiatives were led and grown frombottom-up rather than being pushed from the top. He found that there was much wider acceptance and that everyone enjoyed the experience muchmore.
I think you need to be deliberate about a lotof things. I'll take a good example: it is what we call our Shrubbersvoice squad - it is a group of people we set up to talk to people inScrapinghub to represent different views, to kickoff initiatives...weare doing a Mouvember thing at the moment around wellness. So, we kicked it off and it was a deliberate set up and I decided that this shouldn't be all top-down led. I wanted a group of people at Scrapinghub who were passionate about this and weren't just coming from management.
- Shane Evans, Co-founder & CEO of Scrapinghub
6. Slack channels
An aspect which helps people bond with each other is common interests.Building slack channels that cater to specific interests where peoplecan interact with others sharing similar passions helps them to get toknow one-another, while adding an extra dimension to their workday. Inour survey, 34% of our respondents shared that such dedicated channelswere the easiest and probably the best method to build culture.
...things we have done where we find success at Invision and in my own team are:Channels in slack where people have certain interests. We have got about a few hundred at this point from cryptocurrency to NBA.....That'sactually how you can really have a like a socialisation of certainthemes and things that you are interested in with other co-workers.
- Scott Hanford, Director of Customer Acquisition at Invision
7. Team offsites
When working remotely, we only interact with a digital 2D representation ofany person. While many of the aforementioned initiatives can improve the quality of relationships in the team, none come close to the personalbonds that can be formed when people actually meet in-person. This makes a strong case for team offsites!
Most teams we spoke to have one every 6 to 9 months. The idea is to have informal interactions in anon-work environment to actually know personalities rather than just the concept of a person. Dave Nevogt, Co-founder & CEO of Hubstaff,recognised offsites as being the most important factor in retainingtalent and creating a positive work environment.
We also talkabout this in the discussion of "Remote-first or Remote-friendly", where intermingling of in-office and remote workers (in a company that isn'tfully remote) becomes super crucial.
8. Measure engagement
Another important initiative is to conduct regular surveys and personalsessions to get a pulse of the current levels of engagement andmotivation levels of the team. There are many employee engagement measurement tools that attempt to tackle this outreach in a structured fashion.Listening to your employees at regular intervals can enable you toanticipate any future challenges and address them accordingly.
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