Overcoming the «water cooler gap». Does remote working kill the corporate culture?
Great teams don’t happen overnight. They are built by establishing relationships, a shared culture, and common values.
You already have a company culture, like it or not. While it could be difficult to define, I like the one that states that it is the experience employees obtain, working at your company or in your team. Think of it as the user experience, but for your employees.
Of course, the culture is heavily influenced by the founders of the company, especially in a start-up situation. Companies with a strong culture and a great employee experience tend to have better market returns and be more profitable. Shared culture and values set the foundation for how the team will work together and dictate the health of the team and its results. But for culture to grow organically, the team needs regular contact with one another to feel connected and to establish trust and effective relationships. Regular communication is critical in keeping the team growing, and as a team scales, the culture needs to be reproducible and well established for the organization to grow well.
Our today’s world with its technologies and globalization has made it possible to hire experienced professionals from around the world. But when employees don’t share a physical office, creating a team culture can become very challenging.
When it comes to the essence of the corporate culture, many people tend to believe that water cooler talk (random and non-work-related conversation in the office) is nonexistent with a remote team. In a physical office, people have a chance to chat, stop by coworkers’ tables, and even go out after work, but virtual co-workers often don’t have that luxury.
Therefore, being successful requires radical commitment from leadership of the team because it will 100% make founder’s job harder. Remote teams push the corporate culture to become reproducible faster. While random conversations can be great to keep everyone locally in the loop, the remote team quickly becomes out of date, and culture suffers. Managing distributed teams require more structure, better communication, and a high level of proactive transparency.
Fortunately, it’s far from impossible. There are ways to cultivate the healthy aspects of water cooler talk with a remote team. Just because your team members don’t meet every day doesn’t mean they can’t form meaningful professional and personal relationships with their remote coworkers. As a manager, if you make team building a priority and emphasize the importance of communication, if you can create a safe environment to share ideas and allow constructive confrontation and healthy debates, then eventually you will build a stronger corporate culture using all above constraints as advantages.
Below I would like to share my personal list of important steps for the management of distributed teams. While I’m sure there is much more to add, I think if you are able to apply at least half of the rules I have mentioned, your corporate culture would substantially benefit from it.
+ Just like in a physical office, you should encourage a similar place virtually. For example, if you are using a company chat tool, then consider creating a channel just for this. Chat services like Slack, Telegram, Stride, or Basecamp are ideal for creating “channels” where watercooler talk can happen. Create a non-work related channel to have a place where the team can let off steam while bonding and building rapport with each other. Make sure to set a few sensible ground rules about content, such as your organisation thoughts on language and humour, so that no one gets offended.
+ You need to have clear communication with the members of your team and avoid making assumptions. Anna Sieniawska, the Head Coach at KnowHowDo, an international online learning platform, has recently shared with me her attitude towards her daily communications with the remote co-workers, which I found to be very impoartant: “When you are on a call, you can hear their tone of voice, which supports and clarifies the message you are receiving. When you are just typing, there is nothing there other than words. When you add to it 14 nationalities among a relatively small team, with most of your colleagues, including myself, not being native English speakers, the way you put the sentence together or an accidental misuse of a word can potentially create misunderstandings. So, it’s very important to create very clear messages and to be ready to pick up the phone when you feel a conversation is going the wrong way.”
+ When you work alone, getting an external perspective is hard, ebracing the company culture is challenging, maintaining great relationships with the team takes additional efforts, understanding co-workers with other cultural background requires a certain level of openmindness. Take time to learn about everyone working with you helping them feel like a part of a seamless team. “No matter if I refer to a collaboration between European units or an intercontinental one, “intercultural situations” always occurred. Sometimes they stood up heavily and were hard to be understood and to be handled by us all, other times by a simple meeting in person, a long series of issues and misunderstandings were easily solved,” — that’s what my fellow friend from Women in tech group Oana Oprean wrote me. “Small intercultural trainings that explain the perception and reactions of different people profiles and cultures are a strong base for the success of working in distributed teams.
But, in the end we realized it is not necessary an issue created by the intercultural factor, because approximately the same situations popped up in distributed teams in the same country, different cities.”
+ Make sure to use a video-enabled conference tools, such as Skype, Google Hangouts or Zoom. Seeing coworkers’ faces is crucial to forming personal bonds and trust, and it’s the next best thing to face-to-face interactions, so avoid using text chats solely or conference calls without video.
+ Hire employees that are fit for the remote working or train them accordingly. Working in the distributed company means being technically advanced, enjoing working independently and efficiently without your coworkers and team lead sitting next to you. Most of the communication is written and your staff must be excellent at it.
“Everything starts from the recruitment”, says Anna Sieniawska in our further conversation. “Not everyone is cut for remote work. We hire self-starters who love to collaborate and are genuinely nice people. Understanding why a person wants to transition to work remotely is important. There maybe many reasons, but those who are unable to clearly explain their reasons quite often are simply hoping that a home-based job will be easier. It’s important to understand how the person previously operated within a team, how they reacted when faced with direct feedback, and how they would communicate if they disagree with something or someone.”
+ When you don’t have a water cooler to congregate around, you need special activities to fill in as the causal interactions that create bonds of cohesion and teamwork among your remote workers. Of course, it is great if employees become friends on their own. But sometimes, they need a slight nudge so that the bonding process can be accelerated. That’s where organizations need to wake up and make a move. Discuss and plan your team building activities that you can run both viatually and during physical meetings of your team.
+ Optimize your team schedule and culture for work-life balance. I hear that often people assume employees work less when they aren’t going into an office. But according to my experience, it has been quite the opposite. When you hire people who love the work, they might end up doing it for 12–14 hours before they even realize it. Obviously this isn’t sustainable or healthy, which is why you need to look for a high level of self-discipline and work-life harmony when hiring people. Remote workers need things pulling them away from work, like family, hobbies, and other passions. When people are disciplined about maintaining work-life balance, they don’t burn out, they do their best work, and they’re happy working for you.
+ If you need to work across multiple time zones, make sure it works well for everyone. It is important to know when your team members are active, and what their local times are. A few great digital tools are HomeSlice, World Clock phone application, Every Time Zone, Team Time Zone with Slack authentication. Or you can go analog and be creative like I did. For my work efficiency as well as for a better team feeling, I have installed several watches on the one of my office walls, each showing time from a different location related to my team.
+ Make every possible effort to see your team in person and arrange physical meetings and events for your employees. By regularly hosting face-to-face meetings in the main office, independently or for example during trade shows, your team can begin to strengthen relationship with your brand. It also means that your employees don’t feel lonely or overwhelmed after difficult days and new hires can integrate quickly into your company culture, regardless of where they are.
+ Without a daily reminder that you are a part of a team, it’s easy to feel isolated and disconnected. So if you are ready to go an extra mile, you can ship your remote workers corporate branded things that reflect the same design or elements like posters, t-shirts, or cool branded mug for their desks.
+ Integrate the best digital tools for your team remote collaboration. Basecamp, Active Collab, Wrike, Asana or Trello for project management and team communication, Google Drive or Dropbox for information storage and sharing, TeamViewer or Smart TeamWorks for end-to-end visual collaboration, Skype, Telegram, Zoom, Slack and other messengers for team chats and teleconferences, etc.
I strongly believe that remote work gives companies a vast advantage to have access to the best international talents most companies don’t. And if you can integrate a distributed workforce concept into your company’s DNA, this could become the best decision you have ever taken for your business.
