How to create a remote company culture
Employees tend to stay with companies that they know and understand. If people can’t understand how the business operates, they tend to fall off and leave the company. Having a clean, transparent and straightforward work environment helps employees to feel integrated into the team. Transparency defines everything here, so let’s start with that one.
Transparency is a must to be implemented across every, literally every aspect of your company.
It helps businesses with an in-office team as well, where all the business decisions and management are transparent, and everyone knows where the company is at. However, it is a must for distributed teams for one simple reason: there is no office. There’s no space that is visible for everyone and where everyone can walk into. You have an online space only. You are in ‘work mode’ when you open up your company’s Slack channel, or you open up the company’s email on your laptop – even if you are still in your PJs on the couch. You have to have a transparent setup for everyone, so they will know what’s going on from the minute they log in.
Transparency can be implemented in various aspects: from project workflows, business processes, business decisions to finance.
Some companies have a public online channel where the management discusses current business issues and new alignments for the future of the business. Anyone, even the newcomer trainee can join the channel and check the conversations happening there. Some other companies have a simple, transparent formula for how they calculate salaries and everyone is aware of how much others get, plus how much the company earns actually. Even some others have a transparent dashboard on how many leads they have and how the sales are going – again, anyone, even the newcomer trainee can see it. It gives zero room for business owner to bullshit on how the company’s performing when it is visible that it does not perform as it should be expected. It also gives considerable relief to owners and managers that everyone is aware of the situation. So it also helps new team members to integrate into the system and retain their jobs with the company. After all, they know everything, they feel the whole business from day one. Throw in some in-time earnable distributed company shares, and on paper, it is their business too.
If transparency is the glue for integration, then clear processes are the structures for an integrated system, and simple workflows are the interior design setup for your business.
Clean here means one thing: straightforward and transparent. Everyone knows what to do, why to do it, how to do it, who’s doing it, and who’s responsible for the delivery. Rules are simple too: visible, clear solutions for everyone and nothing is overcomplicated.
Transparency together with simple, clear workflows will bring you distributed business culture, which will help you to hire, integrate, retain and motivate your team members.
How to align common goals
Keeping everyone on the same page is essential for every business. There are three types of goals for every company:
Long-term goals: here goes all the financial goals and annual plans. We are speaking here about corporate strategy.
Milestones: there are certain limits that you can accomplish and exceed to achieve the long-term goal(s) of your business.
Short-term goals: these are more like reports, small achievements, and daily project management task accomplishments also goes here.
First off, before you can make sure everyone is aligned with your goals, you have to define these goals for yourself. Make sure you have a solid business plan with a strategy you can execute. I rarely describe a strategy with more than a year's lifespan. Anything that has more than a year lifespan, I call it the dream. You don’t know where the market is heading, everything changes so quickly, and so many variables are unseen for you – so there’s no point wasting time on 5-10 years plans. However, if you can define a clear annual plan with fixed milestones to achieve, you are off to go. Establishing your business strategy is highly personal, you have to know your business and your capabilities. In this book, I hope I delivered you some insights on market research, product positioning and branding, and organization structure, but these are all general information not tied to your particular business.
Once the plan is ready, please make sure it is transparent too. Please share it with every member of your team so they can see you have an idea and they are in the same boat as you. Make sure the milestones are also shared when achieved and celebrate achievements. There are three rules on how to align goals.
Make the goals transparent so everyone can feel they are in the same boat.
Yes, even financial results and planning. Make sure all of the plans are visible to everyone. You can create a digestible document that is shared across your team and can be commented on by everyone. Who knows, a team member might have some great addition to your long-term plans!
Share updates on progress. The easiest way to share it: is a weekly progress report and a monthly strategy report. These reports can be written in a template, which you should update every time. In the weekly bulletin, share the progress on individual projects, the actual cash flow of the company, and the teamwork schedule, focusing on sprints, time-offs, new hires, and layoffs, and also share new sales prospects and results. In the monthly report do the same but on a grander scale. Don’t focus on the smaller projects and reports but report on how the milestones are and how far you come with the annual plan achievement. These reports are amazingly crucial as they are getting an update for everyone on the progress of the goals.
Celebrate and get feedback. Every time you achieve a goal or reach a milestone, celebrate it with the team. If you fail to reach the goals, gain input from everyone.
Having clear goals help you to get everyone on the same page, and it boosts morale and productivity. No one wants to work for a company that doesn’t have plans or is secretive about results. Transparency helps you to reach your goals, and even further, it helps you to improve your strategy via team insights and feedback.
How company culture increases productivity
Productivity is based on motivation and self-management.
We have talked about motivation, where each employee has to know the goals of the company, set personal goals, and have a drive for success to achieve the goals. Self-management, however, is different, it is less based on personal purposes, rather than individual skills. Self-management is the employee’s capability to organize their work efficiently. As a distributed business owner, you probably hired the best talents who have great organization and self-management skills, but as the key leader in the company, you can also enhance their skills by implementing rules for the company.
First, you need to think about the needs of a remote employee. Then how do they achieve better self-management? If you are working remotely, you don’t have an office with all of its parts: fixed location, daily routines, and sort-of-fixed working hours. While most of these parts can be changed for the good, there are some that have to stay attached. A recurring daily routine, for example, enhances productivity, and while traveling is possible while you are working, a fixed location could also be beneficial. Fixed working hours are the things of the past, so no one stresses this while working remotely. The primary challenge can be the issue of not working and finding the perfect work and life balance. As you don’t have an office and a fixed schedule is harder to maintain, you end up doing more work on your terms.
As a manager of a distributed company, you can enhance productivity and self-management by implementing rules that respect the needs of your distributed team. Some rules you should follow: execute recurring routines, shut down the ‘office’ on weekends and stop tracking time but start tracking progress.
There are some mandatory recurring events for any distributed business.
The first should be the weekly kick-off call with your team, where you discuss the week’s main sprint, tasks to achieve, and the to-do list for everyone. Also, that is the time when everyone can ask for feedback or help. Make sure the call is a recurring call every week at the same time. Only change the call’s time when it is necessary.
Have end-of-the-day reports from everyone, a quick catch-up on what did they work. Have a set recurring time to do the report as well, no later than 7-8 pm for everyone’s timezone – this makes sure, everyone closes the computer at 7 or 8 and only works after that if it is super necessary or they are behind tasks. If it is required, discuss this individually with everyone, some prefer to work late at night instead of working in the mornings.
Have bi-weekly and monthly team stand-up calls, to discuss the company’s goals on a grander scale. Whatever other calls or reports you have, the key here is the consistent recurring style: don’t change the scheduling and repeat the process. It gives a bit of structure to everyone and helps them to organize their remote lifestyle around fixed-time calls and reports.
Those who work remotely, actually work more than those who work from an office. Some find it hard to set a manageable work-life balance and tend to overwork themselves. While working is excellent, overworking isn’t – it messes up our biological clock and productivity. As the manager of the team, you can help them to drop the keyboard by implementing a rule for non-working. The most commonly used practice is not working on the weekends, only if it is necessary. Also, make sure no one works on national holidays and birthdays. Having holidays is also a crucial part, make sure everyone spends some weeks on time-offs.
Connected to time-offs, please stop tracking time. There are two reasons to track time in general: track working hours for those who get paid by the hour and track the amount of time spent on specific projects so you can get an idea of how different projects and tasks need time. Tracking time to get paid doesn’t work. First off, timesheets can be cheated. Second, those time tracking software that makes a print screen on your screen once in a while to monitor your work? Those are horrible. They kill motivation because they destroy the very first element of a relationship: trust. Don’t use them. However, there are time-tracking tools, where the hour spent on they can track projects and tasks. Those are highly useful, and you can use them to track the length of projects. They can help you to assign and delegate responsibilities and plan out your resources.
Implementing productivity rules help you to work better and more efficiently. However, as a remote company, working collaboratively and efficiently, your best help will be the constant use of asynchronous workflows.
