Creating a desirable work environment is key to attracting top-tier talent and standing out in today’s competitive market. Beyond offering a high-quality product or service, appealing salaries, and adequate working conditions, the most sought-after professionals seek workplaces where they can collaborate with competent colleagues and work seamlessly as part of a team.
This is where the importance of knowing how to build a strong team culture comes into play. Companies that fail to promote a positive work culture risk losing their appeal to top candidates and damaging their market reputation – even with their clients.
In this article, we’ll explore how culture relates to high-performing teams and why fostering a positive work culture is crucial to building a sense of belonging and cohesion.
Understanding Team Culture and Its Importance in Remote Work
A company’s culture is what connects individuals with diverse skills, backgrounds, expertise, and aspirations. When people choose a workplace, finding a culture that aligns with their values is often what helps them feel at home and welcomed.
People naturally want to collaborate and be part of an organization they identify with. For tech and engineering teams, which often operate in a distributed workforce model, cultivating a strong work culture is especially important.
Culture serves as the binding force that keeps team members aligned and motivated, even when they’re miles apart.
Strong Team Culture Enables Collaboration
Ultimately, a cohesive and strong work culture allows different people with the most diverse backgrounds to unite around things they have in common and are willing to co-create to grow.
Employees contribute to the company’s growth while simultaneously growing as professionals, creating a mutual benefit between personal and organizational growth.
Workplace Culture Attracts the Best Talent
Culture makes companies more attractive. If companies are to be desirable, culture is the thing that makes it happen.
People want to work in an environment where they feel valued, inspired, and aligned with the company’s purpose. If employees don’t believe in the organization’s mission, they are unlikely to put forth their best efforts.
People Work Better
Your employees' engagement is directly related to increased productivity, boosted morale, job satisfaction, and performance. Fostering a healthy work culture is one of the best strategies to elevate engagement.
Those who feel connected to their workplace culture are also less likely to resign, making retention of top-tier talent another significant benefit of fostering a healthy work environment.
Clients Are Benefited By Teams United By Work Culture
When your team is happy and engaged, it reflects on their work.
Satisfied employees are more willing to go the extra mile for clients, resulting in better customer service, innovative solutions, and more efficient outcomes.
Challenges of Building Team Culture in a Remote Work Environment
Structuring and consolidating work culture, especially in distributed teams, doesn't come without its own challenges.
See some of the hurdles that remote collaboration brings, and how to tackle them.
Communication Barriers
A single language has to be chosen as the common language for all communication. Most commonly, English is the universal language to do that, especially in tech teams who are already used to interacting with vocabulary in English.
Managers must ensure that the team has sufficient proficiency in that language to communicate daily. English proficiency certificates, such as TOEFL or IELTS can help verify proficiency, and make sure everyone is on the same level.
Additionally, teams need proper tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet to streamline communication. Best practices should also be taught to ensure efficient use (e.g. using the @chanel resource on Slack wisely).
Feeling of Disconnection
Assembling a remote team has its advantages because you are fostering collaboration leveraging their unique backgrounds and experiences, with acquired experience according to the places they've studied or previously worked.
While this is great, having people distributed around the world can make it challenging to help everyone feel connected.
Again, the role of work culture is paramount to help bridge this gap, connecting individuals who may never meet in person but share common goals and principles.
Time Zone and Scheduling Differences
Since different time zones are a common scenario for remote teams, everyone needs clarity regarding their peers' availability.
Ask each team member to mark their availability on their calendars on their work calendar platform, so that people can understand if meeting invites or work chats are not promptly responded to.
Although asynchronous work skills are required for global teams working remotely, eventually, the team will need to come together for an event or celebration.
It means that work schedules might have to be rearranged in order to join that event. If that's absolutely necessary and overtime is required, establish an agreement to compensate the late (or early) hours of work out of their standards.
Strategies for Building a Positive Team Culture in a Remote Workplace
There are ways to strengthen the most important positive aspects of work culture despite the geographical distance between its team members.
Firstly, you have to have a clear vision of what your work culture looks like.
Have your main principles clearly stated. Present it to the newcomers as they join the company, and reinforce these principles repeatedly so that employees always remember what brings them together and motivates part of their work at your company.
Here are other strategies for keeping workers happily aligned with important cultural aspects and inspired to do their best at work.
Cultural Principle: Communication
Your job as a manager is to make sure your staff feels safe to communicate.
This unfolds in different ways: people feel comfortable talking with others in a language they're not a native of; they reach out to leadership to ask for help; they present a course correction or solution for a current project to their own direct leadership; or they even reach out to a colleague they haven't spoken with yet but need their help.
It's important for the staff to feel comfortable contacting other people and presenting their own ideas, and it's also important that they understand the protocols for doing so.
It means comprehending which tools to use and respecting the time of response according to the work schedules and time zone differences. Also, using the right approach, such as being respectful and to the point.
Cultural Principle: Appreciating Peers
As much as culture helps connect people and turn "strangers" into peers, it's naive to count solely on these agreements to bring people to collaborate.
Team building activities and events foster a sense of belonging and appreciation within the remote workforce. This is accomplished by virtual happy hours or hangout sessions (e.g. when workers enter a virtual room with other colleagues and get to know each other by talking about other topics than work).
Cultural Principle: Standing By The Culture Daily
This is based on aligning core values across the team recurringly.
Unfortunately, many leaders and companies forget to solidify their cultural values on a daily basis, restricting it to events such as All-Hands meetings or Performance Review protocols to talk about it.
Leadership is expected to constantly make an effort to enhance work culture by reminding the team of attitudes that embody cultural principles.
Ideally, work culture is experienced daily. The more embodied it is, the more it's manifested, even unconsciously, and becomes stronger.
Cultural Principle: Cross-Team Collaboration
Many of the previous strategies lined out in this article are melded into a single topic: enabling collaboration with people you probably don't know but are still connected by something in common (even if that's just the company you're working for).
Preparing your leads for different types of cooperation, including between teams, is one of the most important elements that surround building team culture.
Provide guidelines on cultural norms so that they know how to reach out to other teammates, best practices to collaborate, and what communication resources they have in hand.
Cultural Principle: Open Feedback and Recognition
Whenever you receive feedback, especially when requested (such as during quarterly or yearly performance reviews), act on it.
Be transparent about the feedback received, including the downsides and what people think the company is excelling at.
After showcasing the current status, share what are the next steps and what will be planned to tackle each open end.
Maintaining a Cohesive Team Culture When Scaling
Investing in strong cultural principles while scaling globally is essential for fostering collaboration and performance in distributed teams.
As businesses expand, cultural diversity, time zones, and communication barriers can challenge unity. To overcome this, leaders must establish a universal cultural framework – while respecting regional nuances –, helping to create a sense of belonging.
This is accomplished by regular virtual check-ins, cross-cultural training, and team-building activities to encourage connections across borders, as previously suggested.
These investments will facilitate the creation of a strong, adaptable culture to unite global teams.
The Role of Leadership in Shaping Team Culture
Leaders play a crucial role in embodying and promoting company culture.
As the link between upper management and their teams, leaders must lead by example, inspiring employees to uphold cultural values. It's up to the leadership to incorporate and act by the principles of work culture, encouraging their team to follow these standards.
This is the bright side of leadership, but their performance and attitudes can also backfire.
On the flip side, when the leadership's position does not match what's expected of them, the whole work culture can be impaired. Selecting the right leaders is critical to ensuring that cultural initiatives succeed and gain buy-in from the team.
Besides establishing resources that allow the corporate culture to grow, leaders and managers must acknowledge the efforts of everyone on their team who engages in these initiatives.
Offer public recognition and show how their commitment to collaborating with their peers is appreciated.
Final Thoughts on How to Build Team Culture
Establishing a cohesive team culture is the cornerstone of building a thriving workplace. When employees feel valued and connected to a shared purpose, it drives satisfaction, productivity, and business success.
As one of the main takeaways of our main topic, establishing strong and cohesive cultural principles is the first step. Believing and acting upon these principles will help consolidate your company's image due to employee satisfaction, productivity, and business outcomes.
A poorly defined culture can tarnish a company’s reputation and make it difficult to attract top talent. Don’t let weak cultural practices hinder your organization’s growth.
Continue your streak of finding what tangible and intangible assets drive your company to success. Keep reading to understand the strategic benefits of hiring contractors.
