Ask HN: How do you achieve good company culture for remote teams?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20022779

by hamochi • 7 years ago

6 4 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If all employees in a company are working remote, how do you get a nice culture where employes:

-feel sense of proud (and maybe loyalty) -feel it's a fun work environmet -feel connected on a personal level to each other -feel connected with the vision and objectives of the company -take responsibility for their work and work hours

Do you have any experience from companies that managed well with this?

nellypat• 7 years ago

I worked for a fully-remote company for two years. One of the major issue with remote is the loss of communication and spontaneous conversations. Our company did a good job by having mandatory, regular Slack meetings and get-togethers every 6 months. But then again, you can't replicate those "water cooler conversations" or "lunch break brainstormings"...

At the end of the day you are accepting a bit of a tradeoff between cost/talent availability and communication bandwidth.

planetburgess• 7 years ago

Sense of pride and loyalty is generally not a problem. For many (most?) people working remotely allows them to better balance work and life. It often makes it easier for them to do things that are important to them.

One of the ways people "pay that back" is with loyalty and engagement. Also if working remotely gives them opportunities which they can't get elsewhere they might have a higher attachment to keeping the job.

Taking responsibility for work and work hours also comes with the territory. If you can't do this, you can't work remotely. The more common issue that remote employers have is prevent overwork and burnout.

Feeling connected to each other is a bit more complex. Remote companies need to be deliberate about this, especially as they scale. It depends a lot on the way they are constructed. A company that is remote but all within one region can have a synchronous culture. This influences how workers interact. If the company is spread across many timezones they are more likely to have an asynchronous culture and need different ways to interact and build bonds between people. It is possible, just requires effort. I talk about how we do this on the Collaboration Superpowers podcast https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/232-getting-to-know...

I think the most public remote companies are also companies who are quite thoughtful about why they exist and what they want to be. Which are good places to start when creating vision and objectives!

hamochi• 7 years ago

Thanks a lot, I will definitely listen to the podcast!

return1• 7 years ago

An interesting idea is to use some form of game / sandbox evnirnment for interactions. Interestingly, highfidelity which was until recently a VR-focused startup announced that they are switching to a more business oriented desktop experience, which sounds a lot like "slack in 3d". I think this model has a lot of potential as these 3d social tools lend themselves naturally to interactions, prototyping things together, and also give a sense of "presence" .

https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/toward-a-digital-world

Ask HN: How do you achieve good company culture for remote teams?

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