How to Maintain a Strong Company Culture When Managing a Remote Team

By Jon Clark, Managing Partner at Moving Traffic Media , a New York-based digital agency offering SEO, PPC and Amazon marketing services.

Company culture is something 46% of job seekers value when selecting a company to apply for. However, with more and more companies hiring remote workers, it can be difficult to maintain a strong company culture.

It's not impossible, though. You just need to make a dedicated effort to ensure the culture is strong within your team. Here are some tips to help you maintain a strong company culture when managing a group of remote employees.

Develop collective values.

It's not easy to get team members to buy into collective values, whether they're working remotely or even in the same building.

After all, people come from different backgrounds and have been influenced by different people, environments and organizational cultures. So getting them to jointly adhere to a group approach can be difficult. This is even more true when located in different parts of the world.

However, having clear goals and objectives and putting in place productive and collaborative processes can get everyone on the same page.

Create mentoring programs.

When building trust and creating a sense of belonging, one of the most important things to do is to help your team members grow and learn from their peers.

To achieve this, you need to put in place rituals that can help all team members grow individually and as a group.

During performance reviews, discuss each person's goals and set metrics so you can easily measure their progress. You can also organize workshops on topics such as feedback.

Think of creative ways to keep employees engaged.

Actively looking for creative ways to keep your staff engaged remotely is a great way to foster a positive culture.

You can host breakfast sessions or virtual happy hours where people in the same department can discuss their challenges.

Sometimes you don't even need to have a standalone meeting for this. You can start a Slack channel for fun things like sharing photos of your pets or what you ate for lunch! You can even integrate games into your regular video calls.

You might think that little things like this waste time. However, they help breathe new life into a person's working day, which can often seem monotonous. They also help ensure everyone is connected, so they don't feel lonely while working from home.

Prioritize meaningful work.

In a remote team, people can often feel like they have to respond to requests immediately to show the manager that they're actively involved in what's going on.

Nevertheless, it is essential to agree that everyone has enough space to have time to do meaningful work. After all, we all know that we have to be totally focused to produce our best quality work.

Make sure boundaries are created within remote teams. You can agree on how it should work, such as having a few days without a meeting,