5 ways to nurture company culture with your remote team

Recently, a Gallup study revealed that the number of American employees working remotely rose from 39% in 2012 to 43% in 2016. Another study released by Zug found that 70% of working professionals work remotely or telecommute at least one day a week, while a full 53% of professionals telecommute at least half the week.

While there are many benefits to this new trend to both businesses and employees, there are some challenges as well. One challenge of working with remote teams is trying to instill a sense of positive company culture within the team.

Company culture is an important aspect of any business that even remote teams can benefit from. Here are 5 ways to nurture company culture in your remote team.

1. Reinforce Your Company Values
Every company will naturally develop a certain culture over time which will have a profound impact on the health of the company. The healthiest businesses and companies recognize this and build their culture very strategically.

Imagine building a house without any blueprints or plans. Theoretically you could do it, but what you would end up with in the end would be a hodgepodge of different rooms and systems, which would most likely not function or flow well together.

Your company values should be like a blueprint that you use to help guide for every decision you make. These same values can also be used to encourage employees to make decisions that are in line with company values. This, in turn, creates a unified corporate culture.

2. Take Time to Onboard New Hires
In a regular office environment, new employees have the ability to watch and observe more tenured employees to help learn the norms of the company. These “norms” are the company culture. Conversely, however, new hires can also pick up bad habits from more seasoned employees that can also handicap efforts to change corporate culture.

Remote teams do not have either this handicap or advantage. If anything, it is even more important to strategically initiate remote hires into company culture.

You can do this by meeting with them or at least video conferencing a few times in their first few weeks, assigning them a mentor and preparing a comprehensive onboarding program. Another great way to help them feel they are a welcome and valued part of the team is to send new hires a welcome gift.

3. Encourage an Environment of Open and Friendly Communication
According to a survey by Buffer, loneliness (21%), collaboration and/or communication (21%), and distractions at home (16%) are some of the biggest struggles of remote workers.

Many businesses have long been opponents of using work time for socializing, and yet numerous studies show that this social aspect of working together is actually a critical component of business success.

You can help foster and facilitate a great deal of this critical social component by encouraging the use of tools such as the Slack app or other chat and communication apps to engage in more than just business communication.

4. Ensure Some Face to Face Time
Research shows that infants start processing faces at nearly adult levels as early as 4 months old. Any dating site in the world will tell you the importance of including a picture in your profile. Not even necessarily one of your body, but of your face. Science shows that we are able to draw conclusions about people based on a photo in just 40 milliseconds or less than one half of one tenth of a second.

Ultimately, really getting to know someone also involves getting to know their face.. This makes creating face time for your team a key priority. Whether it is meetings via video conference or a quarterly or annual retreat, getting your team to recognize each other by sight and not just by name is a critical component of building a comprehensive corporate culture.

5. Implement Virtual Team Building Activities
Just because your team does not share a physical space does not mean they have any less necessity to truly function as a team. In fact, sometimes the working out of conflicts that naturally arise any time people have to share a physical space together are some of the best natural team building exercises.

With remote teams, you may have to work harder to build the same team dynamics that are built by individuals sharing a physical space together. One way to do this is by building team activities into workflows and brainstorming sessions into your production processes. You can also assign different individual to lead team meetings, which is a great way for teams to get to know everyone on the team.

As remote work continues to grow, it is critical for managers and leaders to develop new types of team building skills and activities. Having employees who work and function well together as a team, is critical to the health and success of any business. Staying in constant communication with your team can also help you consistently take its pulse to help head off any issues before they have a chance to take root.