Six tips for building and maintain a remote working culture

In the past few years, remote working is now commonplace. Organizations have tested different ways to ensure that teams are connected and empowered with tools and processes for them to perform their best.

It's certainly not been an easy task for employees. A typical day of remote work might include wading an inundation of information across channels, training the new employee, giving feedback on a project, and scheduling in time for intense work amid meeting marathons and at-home prioritizations.

It can be hard to stay engaged and productive in a disconnected world. Therefore, the main question is: how can you set your employees up for success in an increasingly remote and dispersed world?

We talked with 's Chief People Officer Crystal Boysen, to get her thoughts on how she works with remote work in the present. If you're just starting your enterprise-scale remote journey here's a brief primer on remote work along with suggestions on how you can build a more inclusive and cooperative workplace using videos.

What is remote working?

A remote-first workplace allows employees to perform their duties from the workplace. Remote companies might ask some employees to visit the workplace (depending of their job) and allow some freedom for other employees.

Before 2020, remote work was usually reserved to entrepreneurs who were freelance, small-scale business owners or even the rare digital nomad. But that's transformed in recent years with over 45 percent of full-time workers across the United States working from home for at least a portion of the time by 2021, according to Gallup study. Now that office spaces are re-opening, those same employees do not want to return to the old ways: according to an Gallup survey, 9 out of 10 remote workers wish to remain at least partially remote going forward.

In reality, because our team includes hybrid and remote employees, our workspace still remains completely remote-first.

How to build a remote work culture

1. Audit your existing work processes

The initial step for establishing a remote work culture is to take a examination of your existing systems and procedures. Consider:

• What does your company's structure for decision-making?
• What are the ways teams can be held accountable to goals?
• What is the way that people are celebrated?
• How do you keep information flowing across the entire company?
• Where can employees go to get the information they require?

In many ways, making a sudden shift to remote working can expose weaknesses in your organization's methods. Once you've analyzed what systems in your company operates it is possible to identify areas to work on.
In this case, you could find that remote work assists teams in creating better documentation for their organization and also use the same decision-making process.

2. Create rules for engagement

The best cultures aren't created by chance Therefore, you must plan and communicate what you want your workplace culture for remote workers to look like. We at iWork, are a firm believer in the flexibility and inclusiveness of our employees, which is why we've created rules for engagement that reflect that.

Regarding the flexibility aspect, Boysen says, created roles that are hybrid as well as remote that allow employees to work in the way that they do most effectively. Surveys have revealed that employees say they appreciate things such as extra time in the morning to spend with family or getting children up and ready for their first day of school. Being able to skip the commute every day improved their overall health. And since it's important at for employees to feel well as human beings, not only employees, this flexibility became really important to our remote work culture.

It is also a part of the rules that govern our engagement. When working in a hybrid setting it is difficult to make remote workers feel like second-class citizens, so setting rules that make certain that everyone feels respected and included is important.

For instance, if there's an event of any kind, all in-office employees ought to consider participating in a video call using their laptops from different rooms. This helps ensure that distant employees aren't marginalized from discussions with colleagues.

As remote work may easily be a part of people's daily lives, it's also beneficial to set rules that enable employees to set boundaries regarding their work. That might mean company-wide, meeting-free afternoons to combat Zoom fatigue, and allow employees to be focused on their jobs. Employees can also set their agendas to have the meetings are scheduled to end within 10 minutes of the hour to ensure that nobody gets stuck in back-to-back meetings.

3. Consider investing in tools that allow remote collaboration

To work well when working from afar, workers require the ability communicate with each other in the same way at home as they do in the workplace. That requires specialized tools that encourage deliberate collaboration.

For other collaboration across teams using a chat application (Slack) as well as the video-call provider (Zoom). The whiteboard is an online software, Miro, that allows teams to discuss and collaborate in projects on a synchronous basis. We've also invested in a platform that lets us share our goals, objectives, and key results. That way, we can all align on our priorities and ensure that we're all working towards the same goals.

4. Focus more on your communication

Communication is a major part of the workday in an officeand it's important not to lose that whenever you work remotely. This might not seem sexy or cool, but upping your asynchronous communication and record-keeping game is vital for establishing a culture of remoteness.

Naturally, the flip side is documentation: we also recognized that we had to get extremely proficient in capturing all information, from our meeting minutes to updates on projects to the decisions made. So we overhauled the intranet website and made it easy for everyone to access and find the information they needed.

5. Learn to train leaders in managing teams remotely

We've discovered that managing remotely demands special skills than managing teams on the ground. As we began to transition to a work-from-home culture some of our employees had difficulty adjusting and we were aware that it was necessary to take more steps to help them.

The playbook could cover every aspect of managing the team remotely, such as how to establish an example for setting communication boundaries, how to run effective meetings remotely, and how to conduct email in a manner that is appropriate like.

This is the definitive guide for online training

Make sure that your team leaders and managers the tools to teach their teams across the world using video.

6. Make connections and collaboration a priority.

After polling their employees following moving to a remote work style, the most important thing that they said they were missing was a feeling of belonging to colleagues. Connection and personal connections that can be created organically at the office requires an extra level of effort in a remote workplace.

For , that meant finding ways to proactively bring folks together. There were lots of ideas for new methods to create connections remotely for example:

• We're launching a channel called #CoffeeDate in our Slack, which pairs coworkers once a month for 30-minute, virtual coffee dates.
• Creating a #ShoutOut channel in Slack in which employees can offer kudos to anyone in the organisation.
• Teams should be given budgets to fund group-building online activities like trivia nights, or arts classes.
• Having new hires create brief videos that introduce themselves, which will be shared with everyone in the company.

Develop an inclusive, engaged and adaptable remote culture.

If you've traditionally operated as an office-based culture it can be challenging for you to change to a remote-first approach to work. But, with a little planning and dedication, you can establish a working environment that benefits all of your employees regardless of the location they connect to.