How to Build a Remote Culture that Works - Lessons Learned over 5.5 Years

We were 100% remote before it was the norm - starting in early 2017 when our company was founded. Operating remotely was born out of a desire to find the best marketers.

Since we started with me as the sole full-time person leveraging a network of contractors, having a physical location never crossed my mind.

As the company grew, we briefly thought about getting a space in Dallas since many of us are based here, but then we started to worry about how people who weren’t based in Dallas would feel.

Would they think they were somehow “missing out” on something, or think we’d eventually force them to relocate? Dallas is a big city - would people want to drive down to an office?

I’m proud of the culture we’ve built, as shown through our KPIs - 76+ NPS, 62 eNPS, an attrition rate significantly lower than the norm, and 75 percent CAGR since our inception. We have people in 16 states and 23 cities.

Here are some tips on building a remote culture that works for employees, clients and developing a healthy, sustainable business.

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Interview for Values

Remote companies have much broader access to talent, which is great but also poses a challenge since competition has increased significantly.

To build a strong culture, it’s critical to screen for values - but finding people with the right skills is still important since nothing hurts morale faster than unexpected churn or people feeling like they have to carry someone’s workload.

We use a combination of behavioral questions like “have you ever been in a job where someone asked you to do something that conflicted with your sense of integrity? If so, how did you handle it,” paired with technical exams and skills-based interviews.

In addition, we use Strengthsfinder to get a sense of what the person is like at a deeper root level - are they extremely competitive? Empathetic? Achievers? We have a document with each person on our team plotted so that we know where we may have some gaps, and also to help leaders manage their direct reports and collaborate.

Over the past year, we’ve also added Skillsurvey for quick reference checks. We use tools and assessments, like the Leadership Circle Profile, internally to help our employees become better leaders and are always looking at how we can leverage these tools to recruit leaders that fit our culture into any open Director level positions that we may have.

Build Community

One of the things companies struggle with when they go virtual is building a sense of community. It’s extremely easy for silos to exist in physical companies, and even easier for them to exist in remote ones.

Community starts with having a shared reason for existence - ideally something bigger than “just” work, so every employee starts their first day with an overview of our vision, mission, and values. A friend of mine said that culture is simply how we treat each other every day - so setting clear expectations out of the gate is important.

Here are some other things we’ve done to build community internally:

Virtual happy hours ahead of their first official day - About a year ago, we started inviting new hires to a virtual happy hour ahead of their start day. This allowed them to get to know some of the team as “people” first.

Team-led onboarding - We’ve moved to a team-led onboarding approach in order to create a more diverse set of relationships for individuals during their first week. Rather than having a checklist drive self-guided learning or relying solely on asynchronous video training, this helps for connections and give people “buddies” to ask for help. One person takes each platform we use (e.g., Asana, Harvest, Domo) or training document and walks through this with their new colleague.

High-fives - We use technology called 15five for employee performance management - managing agendas for 1-on-1s, weekly check-ins, and more. But our favorite feature is the ability to give colleagues public high-fives which are shared in Slack. It used to be tough to get the team to share kudos, but now there’s a stream of kudos and people recognizing each other throughout the week.

Wellness challenge - We’ve done some wellness challenges, where the team competed against each other and different companies to raise money for one of our favorite nonprofits. This helped connect people across teams and gave them something to rally around & talk about. Even when work chatter died down on Friday afternoons, we’d see people sharing their fitness activities throughout the weekend.

Donut meetings - There’s an app called Donut which randomly pairs two people for a conversation each week. This has allowed colleagues that don’t work together to meet. Having time set aside for co-workers to connect about non-work topics is crucial to building a deeper level of trust between our people. In addition, I have recurring “bonus donut” meetings set with everyone in the company - this gives employees a forum to share their thoughts and just get to know me as a person, and vice versa.

Breakout rooms during larger meetings - As we’ve scaled, we’ve noticed that sometimes people don’t want to speak up in large meeting sessions. We started using breakout rooms on occasion to put people into groups of 3-5 individuals. This lets them connect and have more open dialogue.

Build Trust

A lot of communication in a remote setting happens digitally, so there’s a lack of tone and body language. As a result, building trust can be a bit more difficult.

Here are a few of the things we do to build trust in a remote environment:

Help me Slack rooms - We’ve created “help me” rooms that make it clear that asking for help is a good thing, and not a sign of weakness. These include requesting help with everything from client presentations to excel.

Asking for feedback and acting on it - We poll employees and contractors quarterly and request start/stop/continue feedback along with an eNPS (employee net promoter score). We also ask for a Pulse check during weekly check-ins through 15five. In order to earn an employee’s trust, it’s critical to actually act on the feedback rather than just see it. Managers are encouraged to comment on items within the check-in and mark them as reviewed.

Daily 15-minute standups with new hires - Ensuring there’s a scheduled time for new hires to ask questions of their manager over the first few weeks while rapport is built has helped build trust between direct reports and their managers.

Sharing client feedback - Employees want to feel like others are happy with their work, but also need to know if something isn’t going well. We use AskNicely for NPS and feedback capture, and share that with our teams. It gives them something to rally around.

Transparent all-hands meetings - We have a monthly all-hands meeting where we share updates on new hires, new business, financials, and also offer training that the entire group can benefit from. We have various leaders present so that our team knows that I have trust in our leadership group and the rest of the ranks. During the time of turbulence, we openly discussed what was happening in the business to ensure that the team felt comfortable about our financial health.

Encourage Collaboration across Disciplines

One of the things that helps build respect for teammates is a deeper understanding of the work they do. We have established a few forums to encourage collaboration across disciplines, but also to help others better understand the contributions their colleagues make.

These include:

Monthly shared learnings meeting - In this meeting, people from different disciplines share what’s new in their functional area (betas, trends, industry news), or learnings from work they’ve done recently. As the meeting has grown, we’ve started including some breakouts to facilitate communication.

Single Slack rooms for clients - Rather than having separate rooms for each discipline and client, we create single rooms per client. This helps make it easier for people to understand what is going on across different aspects of the relationship and break down silos.

Pro-bono work - We have only taken on one pro-bono client thus far, but it was a great opportunity to connect people across all aspects of a client’s business and brought the team together for a purpose-first project.

Let People Know it’s OK to Have Fun!

Many people miss the banter associated with sitting near colleagues or crossing paths with them at the watercooler. To fill this void, we’ve created a few Slack channels to help people know it’s ok to take a few minutes away from work and just relax & connect.

#fun-stuffs - A room dedicated to random banter, or sharing updates that aren’t a high priority.

#petful - A room dedicated to any updates featuring our trusty sidekicks and officemates.

#thrive-together - A room dedicated to sharing anything related to fitness or outdoor activities. People like to keep each other motivated and share their successes.

#would-you-rather - A room dedicated to asking nonsensical “would you rather” questions like “would you rather have hands for feet, or feet for hands”

Make it Easy to Find Information

The barrier to switching jobs is pretty low in a remote world, and onboarding is tough even in an in-person environment. We strive to minimize frustration by organizing documents and finding technology that works reliably and works together. This was a low priority when we were smaller but increased greatly in importance as we started adding more employees.

Examples of projects we’ve completed include:

Organizing documents into a structured Google Drive with consistent naming conventions
Implementing a project management tool like Asana
Deploying Gusto as a single administrative tool for employees (payroll, benefits, 401K)
Picking a modern tech suite that works together (Harvest, Hubspot, Asana, Ask Nicely, Quickbooks, Gusto, LastPass)

While we looked at Trainual as a solution, we ultimately decided the need wasn’t there yet. However, it’s something we’ll consider again in the future.

Have Measurable Accountability, But Maintain Flexibility

We believe in a “trust but verify” approach to management, but know that the reason that people work from home is to have flexibility. As an agency, we keep an eye on things like utilization, capacity, and billable hours - no different from most any other service business.

Since both our team and clients are spread across the USA, we aren’t very focused on what hours someone is in front of their desk as long as they are generally available during core working hours. Work / life balance is important, and flexibility to pick up kids or run to a dealership is a part of that. (I wrote the outline for this article on my phone while waiting for a loaner vehicle)

So rather than focus on hours worked, we keep an eye on overall metrics by employee to gauge productivity and ensure that we are delivering on contractual obligations.

We use Harvest for tracking hours completed by individuals, both against client work, but also on internal projects and meetings. No one here has the time or desire to go through time tracked at a detailed level, so we use the data on a monthly basis to ensure we are seeing expected billable percentages.

If something seems off, we’ll have a discussion with the person and their manager to understand if there’s a gap we aren’t aware of.

Weekly one-on-ones are also a part of trust but verify, but as that trust is built, there’s less verification needed.

Get people together IRL

At the end of the day, it’s still a great idea to pull people together in real life whenever it’s feasible. Think of all the money you’re saving on an office and invest it in company-wide or team get-togethers!