9-5, Monday-Friday, in-person office work are all relics of the past. Let's revolutionize how you live by changing how you work.
How do we create a genuine culture on a remote team?
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Hey there, Big thank you to everyone who attended our first live Q&A event! The recording is now available to Work Forward Society members. Check it out here or join the waiting list if you're not yet a member. Now, back to our Q&A series, where I answer popular remote work questions, explain why common advice doesn’t work, and share what I recommend instead. Reply to this email if you have a question you'd like me to cover next! TLDR below 👇 | Read this on the web | Subscribe How do we create a genuine culture on a remote team without happy hour type get-togethers? Team members keep mentioning their desire for more connections with colleagues but then don’t attend the social events. What do I do? Building culture is not as related to social events as most people believe. Culture comes more from how you work than social events like happy hours. When you were working in person, if the office had a micromanagement work style where you were regularly overworked, the after-work happy hour events didn’t change the culture of how the first 8 hours made you feel. People don’t want to hear this (because it’s not as simple as scheduling a virtual social event), but if your workplace doesn’t have clear values, no amount of social Zoom calls will create a genuine culture. There are three types of distance when it comes to remote work:
Typical companies focus only on the first two. The key difference in remote companies with fantastic cultures is they focus on affinity distance first, then operational and physical. Ask yourself:
The answers to these questions serve as the foundation to great culture. Building affinity requires a focus on trust, transparency, and autonomy/alignment. Once you have this established in the work itself, you can then extract key elements to design effective culture-building activities. Here are some examples: Groove HQ has intentionally built a culture with a strong emphasis on experimentation. This value was designed into their hiring and day-to-day work style. Because it is ingrained in how they work, they can now use it in non-work activities to build their culture even further. So they started a 30-day challenge. Team members opt-in at the beginning of the month and then check in with a quick daily message in Slack. One team member noted, “It may sound a bit odd, but right away, it felt energizing. Like we had just developed a deeper relationship across the team in a matter of hours.” Another example is Buffer, who has built a strong culture emphasizing self-improvement. So, each week, they share the personal improvement goals they’re working on: Personalized activities like this are much more effective at building genuine culture than generic social Zoom calls. Look at the unique variables in how you work, then design uncommon connection activities (or "social zingers" as I like to call them) to ingrain those values even deeper into the culture. If you're looking for additional help designing genuine culture-building activities, book a coaching call here. TLDRCulture comes more from how you work than social Zoom calls. Instead of focusing on mimicking happy hour events, embrace the new medium. Find your company’s unique values, then design social zingers to ingrain them further. Quote of the Week Culture is not an initiative. Culture is the enabler of all initiatives. - Larry Senn In Other News
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