We live in an increasingly digital age world. While remote working was once seen as a luxury, employer perspectives have shifted in recent years. By 2025, more than 32 million Americans are expected to be working remotely. While remote working has benefits for both companies and employees, establishing a strong remote work culture is essential.
For remote workers, it sets the framework for a healthy work-life balance and lays out clear expectations. For employers, it defines company culture, values, and goals. While establishing a strong culture is easy enough in a traditional work environment, cultivating a robust remote work culture can be more challenging. However, it’s by no means impossible.
What is Remote Work Culture?
First, let’s look at work culture in a general sense. It’s a complex system of company values and societal norms that impact the attitudes and performance of employees. A clearly defined and rigorously enforced work culture is vital, but it can be hard to implement with a remote workforce.
Some businesses depend heavily on remote employees, while others are forced to adopt remote teams and hybrid work models to facilitate international expansion. In either case, it’s important to foster a culture of connection, build trust, and promote togetherness.
Different tools and digital practices will need to be introduced to create a more robust remote culture. These can vary depending on whether you’re a wholly remote company or only a fraction of your employees work remotely.
How Do You Improve the Culture of a Virtual Team?
Looking to boost employee engagement? Need to improve asynchronous communication between remote team members? Read on for some essential tips on how to build a strong remote team culture.
Outline Your Mission Statement and Company Goals
You’ll get better results from your remote teams if they know what they’re working towards. What are short-term company goals? What about your long-term mission statement? You’ll need to capture these concisely and share them with remote employees. This way, they’ll feel more invested in their roles and committed to the organization as a whole.
Establishing Trust with Remote Employees
If it’s your first time working with virtual teams, entrusting remote workers with assignments can seem like a daunting prospect. However, remote workers need to feel that they have your confidence. The more you trust them, the more they’ll trust you in return.
Thinking about using online activity trackers to monitor the performance of your virtual employees? In certain situations, these can be useful. However, if remote employees feel like they’re under constant surveillance, it can be counter-intuitive.
Rather than focus on the amount of hours your remote workers are putting in at the computer, consider their output instead. No matter how effective those monitoring tools are, you’ll ultimately have to entrust your teams to self-manage. For project management purposes, it makes sense to keep a watchful eye over your remote teams, but you should avoid the urge to micromanage every minor task.
Overhaul Employee Onboarding
A well-executed onboarding will get any employee off to a good start. When working remotely, it’s even more crucial. A great onboarding process welcomes new hires to your company and cements healthy working relationships, giving remote employees the confidence they need to excel. With Gloww’s templates, you can put together virtual onboarding and prepare an online company training in moments. Introduce them to the team and your core values, test their knowledge with company trivia, and remind them about those urgent to-dos with a personalized onboarding checklist.
Invest in Training and Professional Development
Many businesses have let training and professional development fall by the wayside since remote working became the norm. However, if you want to retain employees for the longer, a culture of learning and development should be at the core of a remote workplace.
While training is a staple of onboarding, employees at every level can benefit from continuing development. To ensure success, you’ll first need to identify any skill shortages and competency gaps. Next, identify learning preferences so you can adapt your training material accordingly.
Gloww makes it easy to create training sessions in minutes. You can edit your sessions along with colleagues until you find an approach that works for everyone, then reuse your sessions again and again. Enrich your training modules with PDF files and PowerPoint presentations, upload HD videos, and more.
Keen to see if your remote employees have taken everything on board? With Gloww, you can carry our learning assessments or run live polls to see how well your sessions have gone down with participants. If you’re looking to boost employee engagement, you can even incentivize online training with games and leaderboards, handing out prizes to the high performers.
Ensure Everyone’s on the Same Page with Daily Sync-Ups
Sync-up meetings are a less formal way of bringing together teams in a remote workplace. Sometimes referred to as huddles, sync-up meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes. Because they’re so concentrated, sync-up meetings won’t disrupt a busy schedule. What’s more, they’re useful for providing ad-hoc updates to ongoing projects, ensuring everyone is alerted to shifting priorities.
Running sync-up meetings is a good way of enhancing internal communication between remote teams. Failures can be reflected on, victories can be celebrated, and solutions can be suggested. Whether you’re running sync-up meetings daily or weekly, Gloww provides you with the tools you need to keep your remote teams connected.
Make Use of the Best Tools
Without the right tools, remote working is doomed to failure. As well as basic hardware and internet connectivity, employees will need access to digital platforms where they can communicate with colleagues and supervisors. What’s more, they can be used for collaboration purposes.
With an interactive video conferencing solution like Gloww, your teams have the ideal outlet for staying connected. Whether it’s an all-hands meeting or collaborative session to hammer out the finer points of a new project, this browser-based platform makes working within a virtual space easier than ever.
Dedicate Time for Networking and Team-Building Activities
When working remotely, it’s easy to overlook the importance of internal communications. While drafting an email or picking up the phone is simple enough, most remote employees won’t feel spurred into action unless they really have to. Therefore, it’s important for you as a business to offer networking opportunities and foster a healthy team culture.
You’ll want to regularly set aside time for networking sessions and team-building activities. This can be a little complicated if your employees are dispersed across the globe. If you can’t find a single time that works for everyone, think about hosting multiple sessions instead.
An easy way to promote a healthy remote work culture is to host weekly online meetings. Regular virtual meetings with remote employees creates a culture of transparency and encourages open communication. You can reorient your teams by setting new goals or responding to the challenges they’ve been facing. Ditching the formalities can be a great way of forging stronger, more meaningful connections with remote employees.
If time is of the essence, you can incorporate networking into a larger all-hands meeting. However, you’ll get the best results if you provide plenty of space in your schedule for your team to unwind and socialize as they would in a traditional office setting. Try and set aside a few hours every month for team-building activities. With Gloww’s collaboration tools and gamification features, you can turn any virtual get-together into an online team-building experience.
Keep it Fun
One of the best ways to create a strong work culture is to engage your employees with fun activities such as team happy hour (here are our best happy hour ideas to try out). Once the Friday debriefs are out of the way, add some flavor to those end-of-week virtual meetings with trivia quizzes or team-building games. If you’re meeting at the end of the month or just before a major holiday, you can get festive with themed events and think about offering prizes. Keen to maximize event attendance? As well as internal emails, send casual reminders to your teams via social media channels.
Can Gloww’s Features Help Create a More Enjoyable Virtual Work Environment?
Are you fresh to the world of remote working? With Gloww, getting things off to a great start is simple. Unlike other video conferencing solutions, Gloww is packed with features that make staying connected easy and enjoyable.
Need to plug knowledge and skills gaps? You can use Gloww to host webinars or take charge of online employee training and professional development. Have you been left disappointed by second-rate video conferencing solutions in the past? With Gloww, you can put the personal touch to those weekly get-togethers and one-on-one meetings.
What’s more, there’s a huge suite of apps and games you can use to spice things up. Perfect for group sessions and team-building days.
5 Activities to Boost Remote Work Culture with Gloww
Need some pointers to promote your remote work culture? Below are just a few of the ways you can use Gloww to your advantage.
Virtual Team Building Word Cloud
If you’re looking for the perfect way to kickstart a virtual presentation, word clouds are a great way to go. With Gloww, you can use word clouds to get a feel of the room and see what everybody’s thinking. As well as being handy for gathering insights, they’re an effective icebreaker. Use them to kickstart employee training sessions with larger teams or as a lead-in to team weekly meetings. For more ideas on fun icebreakers for remote work and cool presentation ideas, check out our other articles.
Sticky Note Appreciation Wall
The more appreciated your remote employees feel, the more productive they’ll be. Appreciation walls are a common sight in traditional offices, with employees encouraged to leave personalized sticky notes to express their gratitude. Just because you’re working remotely, doesn’t mean you have to say goodbye to this nifty initiative. With Gloww’s sticky note feature, the appreciation wall can remain a firm fixture of your everyday routine.
Collaborative Brainstorming on the Whiteboard
If collaboration has hit a brick wall, it’s time to get creative with solutions like Gloww’s digital whiteboard feature. Perfect for getting your remote workers thinking together, whiteboards are a must for brainstorming sessions. You can use them to set activities during team-building sessions or for generating quick feedback during a more formal meeting.
Onboarding Meetings
The lack of face-to-face interaction can be an issue when hiring for remote roles. To maintain the human connection, use Gloww to enrich the remote onboarding process. This can be as simple as a one-on-one interaction as you introduce your corporate structure, mission statement, and values. Alternatively, you might want to bring a group element into play.
Live Polls
Polls and surveys are another great way of reading the room. Gloww’s live polls and surveys can be readily customized to capture the information you’re looking for. Feedback is vital when establishing a remote work culture, so you’ll want to use them at every opportunity. Polls can be very effective for daily sync-up meetings, especially when you want to keep meeting runtimes tight.
Use Gloww to Build a Strong Remote Work Culture
Whether you’re entering the industry as a remote employer or experimenting with a hybrid working model, fostering a healthy remote work culture is crucial to success. Many businesses will find that their remote work culture aligns pretty well with their existing one. However, there’s also room for a little fine-tuning.
With Gloww, you have a ready-to-go platform that can streamline your transition to remote working. Use collaborative tools to encourage engagement between remote teams and improve internal communications. Have you made the switch from a traditional office setting to remote working? With plenty of interactive apps and games at your disposal, it’s easy to bring the social element back to your operation.
Gloww also has a a lot of interactive templates for you to choose from. How about a fun pastel team activity, or an orange team activity to spice things up? There is also a hippie green template for all the dreamers out there! For more standard ideas, check out our template for team meetings, the template for group meetings, and if you have a one-on-one call in mind, we have the perfect template for it as well.
Ready to reap the benefits of Gloww? You can get started with the platform today. If you’d like to learn more about our premium features, why not check out our pricing plans? Still have more questions about Gloww? Drop us a message using the online contact form.
