Culture without Cubicles

If your team is transitioning to remote or hybrid (remote lite) work, now is a great moment to take an implicit and organic culture and make it explicit and intentional. 

Think back to the last team that got you excited. What made you enjoy working with your colleagues? What are the things that made you work together so well?   

What you’re thinking about right now is your Team’s Culture. And the odds are that your team’s culture is undergoing some significant changes.   

The pandemic disrupted all of our lives in profound ways, and one of the biggest was the realization that organizations don’t need to share the same permanent workspace to succeed in their goals. For millions of white-collar professionals, a year of working productively outside of the office has proven its viability, and the result has been a permanent paradigm shift away from full-time office work to remote or hybrid work models.   

But while working from home has lots of undeniable benefits, it also comes with some real challenges.   

When workers can no longer gather around the coffee machine or water-cooler for idle chat, office parties or work lunches are no longer available. Organizations suddenly realize how much of their culture was reliant on these artifacts of an office-centric working environment that’s now gone for good.   

Luckily, some easy solutions to these challenges can make a remote team function better than ever.   

What is team culture? 

We define team culture as made up of three elements: Trust, Environment, and Values. Each needs to be understood and built with the others in mind, as they are not three separate pillars but elements that mix to produce whatever flavor of culture you have.   

I’m going to focus on the first of these here today: Trust. (if you want to talk about other pieces of remote team culture, let’s find a time to chat!)   

Trust 

Trust is created (or lost) through our everyday interactions with each other. It’s the grease that helps the gears move and the fuel that powers the motors. When we’re in an office, sharing space, there are a LOT of opportunities for casual interactions with coworkers. We might work with someone on a project, be in the same meeting, or may bump into them in the kitchen waiting for coffee and start chatting about Squid Games on Netflix. Each of those informal interactions creates trust in a team.   

This dynamic means that a lot of organizational cultures end up being more implicit and organic. You don’t have to document anything formally, and you can hope that the team will come to trust one another with enough interactions. 

Many of these organic socializing opportunities are lost when a team is working remotely, so trust isn’t created between teammates. And not being able to walk over to a colleague to ask something easily means that implicit norms about working together aren’t as prominent or accessible.   

Left unchecked, this can become one of the most significant risks and downsides of remote work.   

The Keys to a Strong Remote Team Culture  

Yet the disruption caused by a transition from office-centric to remote or hybrid work should be a significant opportunity for organizations to re-evaluate their team culture by making it more Explicit and Intentional. Here’s what we mean:   

EXPLICIT - Effectively document and share your cultural pillars and expectations so anyone can read them and not have to ask someone.   

INTENTIONAL - Your culture needs to be actively practiced and has systems and traditions where coworkers build relationships and trust. 

Here are some examples of how this can work in practice for your remote team:   

Missing people informally connecting in the office kitchen Monday mornings (i.e., building trust) over what happened over the weekend or the latest TV show or ballgame? 

Make a regular 20-minute space in the Monday standup for check-ins where everyone on the team can share a few things about their lives and how they’re feeling coming into the week.   

Missing the ‘random interactions’ that can sometimes spark new ideas and networking?   

Set up a tradition where new staff has five informal ‘coffee calls’ with colleagues from other departments. Or one where everyone gets paired up with a random coworker once a month for an informal chat. 

Are new employees confused about their work when they can’t immediately ask questions about systems or workflows?   

Have clearly documented processes and communication norms that are accessible to  anyone.   

Help On The Journey 

The transition to remote and hybrid work as the new standard will only accelerate in the coming years.   

But this upheaval of traditional ways of working can be a massive opportunity for organizations of all sizes to re-evaluate their team culture and update it for the new era.   

If your organization is transitioning to working remote and you’d like to chat with me about challenges you’re facing, click here schedule a time to chat.   

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