5 tools to build a healthy remote work culture in 2022

A few days ago, Airbnb joined Twitter, Reddit, and Dropbox to finally admit that remote work wins. In a Twitter thread, AirBnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, told the world that his team would go fully remote, but meet up regularly in-person to maintain a great remote work culture.

Why wasn’t this surprising?

AirBnB had their most productive two-year period in their company’s history—working fully remotely. Covid showed us all it could be done. And it could work out beautifully.

However, it hasn’t been all rosy. Many companies haven’t had the best luck with going fully remote. You might know at least one company where remote work culture is poorly managed and employees grow less responsible, less productive and/or just generally inept. And the loneliness!!! I could talk for days about how many people working from home were ambushed by the lack of water-cooler conversations 🙁

Since Hera is a fully remote company, we constantly invest in ways to improve our performance and culture. While we acknowledge that some job roles and companies might be better suited for remote work, we truly believe that genuine connections among your teammates could be made remotely, alongside overall performance improvements.

How does your company define “remote work culture”?

Not so long ago, you could put a ping-pong table, and boom, employees are happy!

Fortunately, remote work is forcing employes to ask deeper questions about the personality of an organisation, the sum of its values, beliefs, interactions and overall behaviour. You know .. the culture 🙂

While we can’t possibly delve into all aspects of work culture being affected remotely, we will touch on four areas:

• Employee communications/interactions
• Meetings + Remote Work Culture
• Intra and Inter-team collaborations
• Care for general wellbeing

Employee Interactions

Remote workers miss out on the informal interactions that happen at work every day — like talking over lunch or grabbing coffee together at the local coffee shop during breaks.

But do they have to trade this?

People working remotely face 11% more mental burnout if they don’t have enough opportunities to socialise or recharge while working remotely. These issues are similar to those faced by workers who spend long hours in an office without much downtime.

The reason isn’t far-fetched. People need a sense of purpose and belonging, opportunities for growth, and plenty of support when needed.

To help improve employee interactions, any tool that creates virtual offices can help — they provide a space where teams can come together to brainstorm on demand. Slack, Google Meet and Zoom might come to mind here. Later on in this article, I will highlight a few tools that encourage remote collaborations in ways you might not have thought of.

Meetings + Remote Work Culture

Meetings are a big part of many companies’ day-to-day operations.

They allow teams to share ideas, build relationships and collaborate on projects. But they also take up a significant portion of an employee’s day and can be stressful when poorly managed.

So how do meetings shape culture? The effectiveness of your organisation’s meetings can set the tone for your employees’ attitude towards respect for time as a valuable resource.

Remote workers are often expected to attend meetings via web conferencing software or video conferencing services. They should be convenient and easy to use, and almost always provide the same level of engagement as face-to-face meetings.

Intra and Inter Team Collaboration

Collaboration is one of the biggest challenges to overcome when working remotely.

Out of sight can easily be out of mind.

In my experience.

When companies go remote, employees can work from anywhere. But everyone being online on Slack doesn’t necessarily translate to “working together”.

A 2022 study by Kris proved what we already suspected. A group of engineers were 20% more likely to collaborate when they shared a physical office. Have you tried diagnosing a car fault aided by a mechanic on the phone? The experience could definitely be better if the mechanic showed up.

The problem I’m highlighting is not just the lack of physical proximity; it’s the thought, availability and general consciousness that a co-worker who is miles away is actually right there, if only you reach out. Not the same as seeing them at their desk. Out of sight can easily be out of mind.

Again, managers need to take advantage of tools available to them so they can help their remote team stay connected.

Employee Wellbeing

Working for home is an imperfect setup that could turn against healthy living if not intentionally guarded.

With all the time spent at home or in cafes, you’re bound to be less active than someone who commutes daily or spends most of their waking hours at an office. Weight gain and other health problems like cardiovascular disease and diabetes come knocking — especially if you don’t make up for it by exercising on your own time outside of work hours.

There’s also little social pressure to keep up with healthy grooming levels.

As more companies adopt remote working policies, it’s important for managers to think about how best to encourage teammates to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

How do you ensure your employees are always at their best health-wise while working remotely?

Related: Building Systems Around Human Capacity and Growth

5 tools to build a healthy remote work culture

It’s 2022. The popular tools come to mind – Google Meet, Zoom, Slack. But what gems have we uncovered this year? Check out a few of our picks.

1. SWITCHBOARD

Switchboard aims for “remote collaboration that’s as good as in person.” It’s a bold statement, so let’s dissect it further.

Switchboard allows you and your team to work and communicate even on different apps, or browsers. You can bring Figma, Salesforce, Google, and a host of others apps into a virtual room, making remote collaboration a lot more real-time.

Advantages? You get the full benefit of having real-time synergy of diverse thoughts, even though the team isn’t in the same physical space. This model itself improves the chances of teammates forming actual bonds with each other.

Switchboard is great for remote, in-office or hybrid workplaces.

2. MONDAY.COM

Monday.com’s focus is your team’s productivity and overall efficiency. Monday.com is a Work OS with workflows that are adaptable enough to fit into your process, yet disruptive enough to chip away manual work.

Monday.com also increases and improves cross-team collaboration. This level of collaboration, alongside well-coordinated project management, can make a notable difference in organization-wide execution velocity.

3. KONA

If you have a bit of time, watch this demo from Kona. It’s beautiful.

Kona makes it obvious that you take the mental and physical wellbeing of your employees very seriously. You care for them as people.

How does Kona do this?

The tool automates check-ins right within Slack, aggregates and presents the information it gathers, so it’s easy for you to monitor employees’ health and motivation levels.

Kona fits perfectly into employees’ workflow by allowing them to quickly respond with emojis to automatic prompts, with the option of expanding a bit further with short sentences about how their days are going.

The entire check-in and response process takes less than a minute and arms you as a manager with insights to understand how best to support your teammates.

Be it problems at work or in their personal life, Kona makes it easy for you to stay on top of your teams’ motivational factors, and positions you to offer practical help, and/or empathy.

So go ahead. Add up Kona, start building deeper bonds, improving your employees’ work relationships and increasing overall productivity.

4. PANDA

Panda approaches user Interviews (and meetings in general from a different perspective).

How do you ensure different people stay on the same page, even though everyone cannot (and shouldn’t) attend the same meetings?

If you take notes during meetings, or you constantly have to summarize and take decisions based on meetings, you’ll love a tool like Panda.

Panda allows you direct all your attention to the meeting at hand, and actually be more present in conversation, which is something that the constant need to take notes takes away from you.

Panda’s recorder takes care of taking notes by transcribing your calls for you while you focus on the conversation at hand. This way, your meetings have more people fully present, more focused on listening and sharing their thoughts in real time instead of scrambling to take notes.

GATHER.TOWN

Oh I love Gather!! It mimics a real office – gives different sections, not as break-out rooms, but as regular spaces where you bump into people (you are quite literally represented by an avatar that can move around and start conversations with people you bump into).

Gather essentially makes virtual employee interactions less awkward. It has a host of options to change the atmosphere of your virtual discussion space to something a bit more personal.

A twice a month meeting on Gather could leave your team feeling refreshed. You could do serious work there, but we’ve only ever used it for laid back meetings and water-cooler conversations 🙂

Related: How to Pull In Customers By Telling Stories

How do you track remote work culture progress in teams?

You can improve anything you can measure.

Tracking work culture progress in a remote team is not easy, but it can be done. Before deciding to track any progress at all, you need to:

1. Clearly lay down your goals for the team.
2. Define success for each goal in terms of what you see and measure.
3. Decide how much time they’ll need to reach the set goals.

Once these are out of the way, you can start tracking and measuring your team’s performance.

We’ve tried a few things over the years, but here’s what we’ve found to be the most effective:

i. Survey your employees regularly

There are two ways to do this. The first is by asking them directly how they feel about their workplace. This is an easy way to get some feedback, but it doesn’t give you a good idea of how the company has changed over time.

The second way is to use an objective metric like the one below:

Rate your company on each of these questions using a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being low and 10 being high).

Afterwards, calculate the average score for each question across all employees. This gives you an overall picture of how well your team feels about their workplace culture. Track this number over time by asking these questions every few months or once per quarter to see if there are any changes in perception over time. When you take this route, you can very easily find out where you need to make the most improvements.

ii. Set up weekly review meetings

You could hold weekly meetings with your team members or one-on-ones to discuss what went well during the week and what needs improvement going forward.

Encourage employees to share their ideas for improving the company culture by giving them access to tools like IdeaMap — a free online tool that lets employees submit ideas and vote on them.

iii. Track your company’s KPIs

So now, you have your goals set. It is time to track what has been achieved and what has not. This is where tracking your business KPIs comes in. KPIs are quantifiable measurements that indicate if a company, department or team is effectively reaching their goals. Tracking your business’ KPIs involves watching for the changes in key performance indicators over a period of time.

The kind of KPI you would want to track here would be your people-based KPIs, where you would be measuring employee satisfaction, employee turnover rate, rate of absenteeism, referrals, customer satisfaction, and employee engagements.

iv. Leverage Analytics and insights from tools

Looking through the analytics or reports from the tools you have put in place for a healthy remote work culture is another great way to track progress. Here, you would want to check how well your employees are coping with these tools.

Tracking these KPIs are a great way to know exactly if you are moving forward work culture-wise or not.

Conclusion

Remote work comes with the unique advantage of making any talent, anywhere, available for you. With a little tweak, and great tools to partner with, you could reap the numerous benefits of the flexibility a great remote work culture offers.

If you would consider a remote content marketing team to help boost your content marketing efforts, Hera offers a full white glove experience. It falls in line with taking advantage of talent everywhere in the world, so 😀

Really though, you could improve your remote team’s experience a lot more by a few intentional additions. What have worked for you in the past? What’s missing here?

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