Creating Remote Culture

 

One of the many impacts COVID has had on our professional lives is adapting to a fully remote work environment. Now, more than ever, the responsibility of employee morale and satisfaction falls on the managers and we find ourselves facing challenges we never thought we'd come up against. How do we create a remote culture? How do we engage decentralized teams? How can we ensure our teams feel trusted, respected, and empowered both personally and professionally?

Culture isn't just about great office perks and free food. It takes mindfulness, intention, and rethinking how teams work together. Lindsey Traub led our October GLOW session to share her strategies and tactics for creating remote cultures that thrive. 

Lindsey brings experience across various areas of the business from customer success to partnership strategies and program development. She started her career at a fast food franchise, moved to SaaS start-ups, then 3 acquisitions later, is now Head of Operations Strategy for Adobe Exchange. She specializes in leading diverse teams, both functionally and geographically, to create alignment and efficiency across the org while simultaneously driving growth. 

“6 months ago I was looking for unicorns, now I’ll take a pretty horse. We’re all operating in a place where we might not feel normal, adaptation is key.” - Lindsey Traub

GLOW NOTES

Core pillars required to build remote culture and connectivity across teams

  • Lead with empathy

  • Build trust & over communicate

  • Show personality & have fun

  • Make your team an incubator within a larger team so everyone feels empowered

  • Get to know people personally and make adjustments, always 

Onboarding remote employees 

  • Management

    • Know that it’s okay that it will take longer to onboard someone remotely 

    • Set clear, agreed upon goals and create a 30-60-90 plan

    • Ask for daily updates for the first couple weeks to ensure that expectations are properly communicated, onboarding is effective, and establish bi-directional trust and understanding

    • Create structure & expectation in weekly reporting (highs, lows, successes) 

    • Tailor & deliberate communication to get people to open up 

      • Get specific to avoid non-productive answers. Rather that “how are you?” try “What’s been frustrating about your day,” “What made you laugh today,” or “What do you wish you could do more of/ less of”? 

  • Connection

    • Connect them with a “buddy” or mentor to go to for off the cuff stuff (you’re their boss, and they’re going to be afraid of you) 

    • Introduce them wherever and whenever possible… Slack, meetings, email 

  • Merging physical & digital 

    • “Welcome video” > on different time zones but want them to feel welcomed when they start? Create a welcome video from the team that they receive first thing

    • “Lunch on the first day” > send them a door dash gift card to have lunch together 

    • Send swag

    • Reimburse office supplies to have a comfortable at-home workspace 

Creating a remote culture

  • Take initiative - if the culture doesn’t start from the top town, anyone can step up to drive the change they want to see. Don’t have time to do it on your own? Create a cross-functional culture team. Ideas:

    • Virtual cooking, virtual painting, virtual happy hours (either DIY or Cocktail Courier)

    • Themed slack channels focused on personal & fun stuff (working from home “covid coworkers”, pets, cooking 

    • Volunteer hours 

    • “House tours” AKA cribs… take your laptop around and show people 

    • Book club

    • Kahoot Trivia (switch off who manages so they can pick their fave topics)

    • Jackbox Games game nights

    • “Baby face bingo” > people send in baby pictures and you have to guess who they are

  • Ensure team productivity and reduce Zoom fatigue

    • Create & send agendas prior to all meetings

    • Consider time blocks for teams/ company with no meetings (certain times per day? Certain days?)

Adapting post-COVID 

  • Updates and expectations need to be communicated from the top down

  • Focus on outcome, not output (as long as the work gets done, it doesn’t matter when)

  • Ask yourself if you/ your team needs to have the same productivity as pre-COVID. The world has changed, as long as critical goals are hit, recognize when/ where overall productivity and output can be adjusted

  • When individuals are stuck, work with them on a priority matrix to map what’s urgent, not urgent, important, and not important and help them prioritize based on maximizing the highest value output

  • Get to know the personal situation of your team (what’s their at home living/ working situation? Do they need to adjust their hours?) 

  • Everyone needs to take a level of self-care (from yourself, all the way down) 

  • Acknowledge that things are insane right now and your team isn’t going through this along. Create a culture where people can be candid about their personal struggles and how that’s impacting their professional abilities. Protests, politics, health scares, letting your team know they can take time for themselves is critical to building trust and ensuring productivity when they are focused 

  • Practice what you preach. If you’re a workaholic, they will be too. Considering offering your team 1 day off per month for self-help 

Watch the full recording here

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Bhaji IlluminatiComment