
Ask HN: How do you achieve good company culture for remote teams? - hamochi
If all employees in a company are working remote, how do you get a nice culture where employes:<p>-feel sense of proud (and maybe loyalty)
-feel it&#x27;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<p>Do you have any experience from companies that managed well with this?
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planetburgess
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...](https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/232-getting-to-know-your-
global-team/)

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

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return1
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](https://www.highfidelity.com/blog/toward-a-digital-world)

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nellypat
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.

