Building your culture, like building your product.
Building your culture, like building your product.
Scaling the culture in your remote team can be tricky. We will discuss how you can build and scale your team culture by treating it like a product.
Scaling the culture in your remote team can be tricky. We will discuss how you can build and scale your team culture by treating it like a product.
Building an MVP and then iterating on it.
How would you define culture: The background
In traditional office jobs, culture was free food, table football and ping pong tables. Companies focused less on the actual things that matter - employee happiness, communication and work-life balance.
In remote teams, culture is a lot more than that.
Important aspects of a remote company culture include meetings, project management, the role an individual has on culture, building personal connections, diversity and inclusion, and even the pronouns you use.
Another example - the compensation philosophy is an integral part of your company culture. The hot debate of location-agnostic vs location-based pay is a topic we can dive into in a future edition. But what you choose to follow becomes part of your culture. Global teams stand out for having their compensation philosophy - Like Buffer or Gitlab.
Recently Wildbit announced their location-agnostic pay.
Why is culture important: The problem statement
Remote work is taking over the tech world. Power is shifting from employer to employee. If you have the right skills you can choose from the best employers around the world from the comfort of your home.
Top companies of the future will be people-centric. Above the typical benefits like learning and development, healthcare, ample PTOs, good equity etc, these companies will provide freedom and flexibility on multiple levels - The freedom to work from where you want AND when you want.
Companies with great cultures will win in the long term.
Your culture MVP: The solution
You should start somewhere. Most teams make the mistake of letting culture build by itself - treating culture as a passive entity. The bad stuff can spiral very fast into a shit show.
Building culture is a full-time job. Great teams have dedicated people making a conscious effort to build team culture.
You can build the culture MVP in many ways. If the founder or a senior leader has experience building a distributed team, they can do it. You can also take inspiration from top culture handbooks. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel.
It is one of those occasions where - “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” applies.
Gitlab and Doist have the best remote work handbooks I’ve come across.
These guides include everything on how to do project management, meetings and communicate in an async environment. (If you don’t know what async means, scroll down).
Gitlab recently IPO’ed. If it worked for them, there is a fair chance that it would work for you.
A lot of teams hire an expert who has experience building a culture for multiple remote teams. They can come in and implement a culture for you. If you don’t have experience with remote teams, this is the way to go.
A lot of teams tend to build this first version and leave it there.
Bad idea.
Create a feedback loop: Measuring success
Customer feedback and interviews are the holy grail of product management. With enough effort, you might hit the product-market fit. But that is not your license to stop innovating. You form a tight feedback loop and iterate your product.
The same is true for your culture. In high growth teams - culture requires constant attention and needs a full-time remote ops team.
Start by collecting regular individual and team feedback. These are commonly called pulse surveys. There are plenty of tools that let you do that, right from Slack.
It is also a good idea to do in-person interviews with your employees to collect feedback.
Building culture is a multi-player game. Include everyone in building the culture. In a remote team, people come from different countries and cultures. Have everyone on the same page. Something that might be normal in one country could be offensive in some other countries.
This is why writing down your culture is important. Once you come up with your MVP document it. When you iterate, document it. Just like you release product updates, release culture updates and communicate them to your team on a regular basis.
If you stop shipping your customers will churn. If you stop improving your culture, your employees will leave.
Culture retrospectives
Culture retro is one of my favourite exercises to do in remote teams. It is just like sprint retros but focused on culture. To be specific, it focuses on the feelings and emotions of your employees.
Conducting a team session every month will help you gauge where you are right now regarding the culture.
Mad, Sad, Glad approach to retro is quite suitable for culture retros. Miro has a good template that you can use.
Assemble the right team
My friend Manoj is a Senior Engineer in Gitlab. He put it perfectly in one of our recent conversations.
A good remote team is a function of hiring
Just like you cannot force people to come back to the office, you can also not force remote work on an individual. Different people have different preferences.
Not everyone is suited to work remotely. Good communications skills - both spoken and written - are key to work remotely. Hiring the right people will make it easy to build a high-performance team.
It is hard to convert a team that has been in the office for a long time - but possible with enough effort. It is either remote-first or a messy “full of Zoom meetings and fatigue ” remote work. The latter will lead to burnout.
Diversity and Inclusion
Let’s be brutally honest. A lot of companies implement diversity initiatives for internet points. Only a few deeply care about this. But building a team with diverse skill sets and backgrounds has proved to improve team performance.
If you are a globally distributed team, you are diverse by default. You have people from all around the world. But oftentimes, we see the leadership team is in particular geography and this tends to skew the culture. And people from the rest of the world would need to adjust to this.
It is also important to have people with diverse backgrounds on a leadership level and people team. For example, the people culture in Europe, India and America is vastly different.
If you are a global team and your people team only consists of people from one location alone, you’ll run into cultural conflicts easily.
My partner Keerthi, who is an Engineering Manager recently mentioned another angle of diversity:
Diversity also means hiring juniors, training and coaching them instead of hiring only seniors
People of different age groups and experiences add to your diverse culture. This is why you should focus on learning and development early on.
English and a level playing ground
100% of remote teams I know communicate in English. English is the first language for many, but not for all. A lot of highly skilled professionals struggle with English.
It is a big challenge in remote teams to provide a level playing ground for everyone in spite of their language capabilities.
The two-sided approach to this is
Provide learning and development programs to improve language for those in need
Learn to judge people’s language and ideas separately (This is hard)
Also visiting our argument of “Remote team is a function of hiring” at this point. All job descriptions will have “excellent written and spoken skills” in their requirements. If you wish to work for a global remote team at some point and you are not comfortable in English, start polishing your skills.
Async means freedom. Freedom is the future.
If you read the guides above on remote work, you might have noticed how both emphasise async work. There is a big difference between async and remote work.
Async work lets you fit in your work around your life. You are independent of location AND time. Remote work doesn’t necessarily do that. Doing 9-5 from home, spending a shit load of time in Zoom is not the ideal way forward.
Again, Gitlab has an amazing async guide.
Async work is beautiful because it gives you freedom. It is the natural evolution for knowledge workers.
Most work a knowledge worker does in a company is of iterative nature. And async work is perfect for iterations.
Innovation and brainstorming is still a challenge in the async world. This is why it is a good idea to do off-sites once in a while. The stakeholders can get together in a nice location, have some in-person time and more importantly do brainstorming sessions.
Async is here to stay. Making async communication the core of your culture will help you win in long term.
How did you like this edition of No Office Required? I put hours of research into every edition of this Newsletter. Your feedback helps me make this great.
Thanks for reading and see you soon with another exciting edition!
Sooraj
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