How To Build Great Remote-First Company Culture
Pro-tips for running effective remote or hybrid teams
If you’re reading this, you are likely a “People Leader” at a remote or hybrid company.
You’re the Chief of Staff, Executive Assistant, Head of People, CEO, or team leader responsible for increasing employee engagement, retention, and alignment.
If that’s you, then keep reading to learn about some of our top “pro-tips” for building great company culture especially for remote and hybrid teams.
These lessons come from supporting hundreds of the world’s top startups, Inc 5000s, and Fortune 1000s (most of them remote-first, hybrid, or distributed) with team retreat planning, one of the most important cornerstones of culture-building for remote/hybrid teams.
We’ve had a front-row seat to how People Leaders at these companies use offsites for strategic planning, building trust and intimacy, professional development, “rallying the troops” after layoffs, celebrating after big wins, board meetings, and much more.
Without further ado, let’s discuss various ways you can create great company culture at a remote or hybrid company.
Define Your Company’s Mission, Vision, and Values
Your company’s mission is ultimately what you’re selling to your team.
Why should they join you on your company’s journey? Are you planning to make humans a multi-planetary species like SpaceX, save the planet like Patagonia, or spread ideas like TED?
Your mission statement is an opportunity to “rally the troops” whereas your Vision is the initial phases of this plan (ie the “How”).
For Tesla, the Vision was to create an expensive car, then a mid-level car, and finally an affordable vehicle everyone could afford. For Amazon, the Vision was to sell books online, then expand into other categories.
Your Values are the habits, principles, and guidelines by which you execute your vision. For every company, this will be different. Less is more with company values, and they should be practical, so that everyone knows how to act when you’re not looking. Famously, Meta had an old value of “move fast and break things” which helped employees prioritize speed over perfection.
On The Offsite Blog, you’ll find a helpful webinar diving into these topics more closely should you wish to explore this further.
Encourage Async Communications and Document Everything
With an increasingly global workforce, building a culture of documentation (and teaching your team about effective async communication habits) is going to become “make-or-break” to company culture.
Embracing tools like Notion for process documentation is not just about maintaining a knowledge base—it’s about architecting a scalable infrastructure that empowers every team member with the knowledge they need to drive forward. If you want to take PTO or parental leave, or suddenly scale up and hire dozens of people at once, your documentation will allow everyone at the company to quickly step into any role.
In order to keep everyone focused on “deep work” and also navigate multiple time zones without asking employees to work crazy hours, adopting asynchronous communication habits is key. Tools like Loom can help you and others convey nuanced, comprehensive ideas without the constraints of real-time scheduling or meeting on Zoom. Plus, Looms can be transcribed and turned into documentation!
The tools matter less than the habits you’ll need to encourage among your team. The best tool is the tool that your team will use. The important thing is to document important processes, teach everyone how to communicate effectively without having to schedule real-time meetings, and developing a company wiki that can help you with onboarding, training, and company-wide communications over time.
Create A Predictable Rhythm of Business
It pays to establish rituals around goal-setting, reporting to investors, and investing in your company’s culture. Having daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly “rhythms” keeps the business moving forward, and you can start with the basics before adding in other motions.
This is especially important for remote/hybrid teams where colleagues may work across multiple time zones, won’t see each other often in-person, and must be self-starting in their approach to work.
Daily: Standups
Should you have an office-first culture, this might be a literal “standing” meeting, where everyone shares what they accomplished yesterday, what they are working on today, and what’s blocking them or where they need help.
As a remote-first company, you can use a tool like Geekbot (which integrates with Slack) to facilitate this exercise.
Weekly: All-Hands Meeting, 1-on-1s, and Company Scorecard
As a founder/CEO, every Monday I meet with my direct reports and encourage them to do the same with their teams.
These “1-on-1s” are about them, not me, and give my direct reports the space to share where they need help, what’s going well, and what potential landmines we’re moving towards. I also typically ask how everyone’s weekends were, and ensure I’m meeting people “where they are at” given whatever is going on in their personal lives.
We also have a 30 minute “All-Hands” meeting where leadership briefly runs through major company updates by department. We also start each meeting with a quick share of gratitude and a fun icebreaker so we can get to know each other a little better each week. Finally, we share the top 5-10 metrics being tracked so we know if we’re achieving our OKRs or not.
Quarterly: OKRs, Board Meetings, and Offsites
Each quarter, we pick 2-4 company-wide “objectives” as well as 3-5 “key results” that would indicate whether we accomplish our objective or not.
If we want to increase margins, for example, then one key result might be to raise prices by 10%. Another might be to reduce our Cost of Goods Sold by 20%. We use our key results to figure out how everyone will contribute to accomplishing company-wide goals.
We also plan offsites quarterly with our leadership team and twice per year with the entire company. Depending on whether you are remote-first or office-first, and how large your team is, will dictate how often you should plan team retreats.
However, at minimum your leadership team should meet for 2 full days each quarter, outside of the office (if you have one) and at a destination where space is cleared for strategic planning.
Plan Regular Offsites
If you are remote-first, you should also plan 2-4 all-company offsites per year to increase employee engagement, retention, and alignment by including them in strategic planning efforts, reiterating company Mission, Vision, and Values, and celebrating your success along the way.
One of the best ways to leverage offsites for employee retention, engagement, and alignment (especially for remote and hybrid teams) is to develop a regular cadence for offsites.
These should not be one-off experiences. They should be predictable so you can plan in advance, utilize feedback from previous offsites to make future experiences better for your team, and increase the ROI on each offsite you host.
With a regular offsite cadence, you and your principal can also plan for the appropriate staff to take on this responsibility in the future, whether you continue to plan offsites but reduce scope in other areas of your job description, bring in other team members to support you, or choose to outsource offsite planning to a trusted resource like Offsite.
For pioneering remote-first companies like Buffer, Automattic, Zapier, Basecamp, 15Five, Atlassian, and others, offsites have been touted as pillars for building exceptional company culture. It makes sense - if you are remote or hybrid, offsites may be the only times of year your colleagues will see one another, meet new team members, and recommit to your company’s trajectory.
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And of course, whenever you plan offsites in the future, make a free account at offsite.com to search our curated marketplace with over 1000 amazing offsite venues globally, 20%+ savings on room blocks, meeting space, and more.
Plus, we offer end-to-end offsite planning services if you want a “done for you” experience. See why hundreds of companies like Buffer, 15Five, HiBob, Metabase, Hampton, and others trust Offsite for their team retreats.
Thanks for reading!
-Jared