Ask HN: How do remote first businesses maintain cultural cohesion?

If you want to talk about non work things, find people who aren't your co-workers. It's OK to only do work things at work, and to separate personal and professional life.

In my experience, they don't

GitLab is great at remote first culture. Check out their open source company handbook. Remote first requires proactive process to keep employees engaged and communicating effectively. If you feel isolated and trapped in a silo, good process can pull you out. Also, look for companies where remote strategy emanates from the senior leadership. A CEO that flows down remote strategy will be more effective.

I worked at a remote first health hardware company with 35 employees for 1 year. From my perspective, there was no culture whatsoever. There was one zoom party where the company sent everyone snacks and playing cards. But aside from that, nothing. Only work talk. No side conversations, therefore no friendships.

I think step one is to have the zoom call on for much longer than just the scheduled meeting time, which we never did.

Begs the question - is (corporate) cultural cohesion something worth pursuing or maintaining? I've heard plenty of good arguments in favor, but the most convincing (to me) arguments are against.

Honestly just don’t think you can in any way that will be meaningful like IRL is.

Video chat and the delays and how only one person can talk at once it just isn’t possible to have proper conversation and connections.

Before the pandemic I would have believed it’s possible but now I just don’t care about remote workers anymore because I have been burned multiple times by them in ways that would never happen with IRL teammates.

I've got better friends and more in common with people on a remote team than I ever had in an office day in day out. Depends on the people. Culcural cohesion feels like some bs term to keep managers relevant.

We’re getting there, I’ve been in your spot and have some tips after fighting for a better remote culture for months: 1. In-person events must happen. Best case scenario, once per quarter. Even once per year is phenomenal though. This will put out a lot of remote culture failure fires. 2. Team-only social hour with games, works much better after an in person event. 3. My newest experiment win: opening up a casual zoom room to the team for anyone who wants to join. Once again, much easier and more desired by people after an in person event. We’ll work together, shoot the shit, etc. It’s really nice, and non-social people love not being obligated to join them.

That’s as good as it’s gotten, and I really like where it’s at. It took months to get there. A lot of people wanted these things, but the convenience of not doing them keeps it from happening quickly. Persisting when support is present is super key to building it up. Honestly, making it happen is just as political as vying for anything else is. Alignment on wanting a good remote culture takes time even when multiple people really, desperately want it.

Encouraging frequent Zoom meetings is a good way to get people together. Like in situations where you’d normally go to a persons desk and discuss something, you’d now hop on a zoom call. Having seniors initiate can help juniors get used to hopping on a call.

My company also has group testing every week where everyone hops on a call and chats while playing with the new build.

Work/company culture is overrated in my opinion. That's why I don't do anything special apart from regular catchups and being nice along with trying to get better paycheck and titles for people reporting to me.

For everything else I let grownups (employees) decide if they want to mingle with others on and off work, either in person or over Zoom.

Mid pandemic one of my clients decided to bring in a manager to handle this. He tried everything that's been suggested here and more and the result was that 3 months later half their team left the company. My point is, some people don't want cultural cohesion and don't want to be "friends" with their coworkers and if you push it too hard on them they'll just leave. So learn to take no for an answer. Hope this helps.

One of the tradeoffs with remote work is flexibility for closer connections. You can work fight this somewhat, but it's the wrong work model for cultural cohesion.

You mentioned that a strong culture is built and requires intention. This is even more critical in remote teams. In person, without deliberate culture development, culture develops organically (which can be bad if it's not the culture you want). Remotely, without deliberate culture development, there will just be no culture at all. It also has to come from the top, or at least have buy-in from the top, for this to work.

Here's some intentional things we do on our team:

* We have a #community slack channel for sharing (that leadership participates in)

* We incorporate community into our weekly all hands. For the first five minutes, people can drop photos from their week that they want to share with the team in a dedicated space in our figjam board and we have a community question people can vote on. Usually this triggers some conversation. We also have a 'goodbye question' that we do a round-robin on at the end of the call. These are both given dedicated time on the agenda. We make an effort to avoid any stale icebreakers and pick engaging questions. We're a small enough team that this works but probably wouldn't scale well.

* Documentation is king. We make our culture expectations explicit and we write these in notion. We have lots of docs. Some of this is social culture (e.g. list of team members and a bit about them with their common working hours), some is work culture (e.g. we expect the team uses their vacation time and do not expect them to be reachable during it), some of it is vision (e.g. our mission statement and values). These are required reading for new hires and part of our onboarding process.

* We regularly check in with the team using things like debriefs, retrospectives, and values assessments.

* We get everyone together for physical retreats. COVID threw a wrench into this but I think ideally we aim for at least twice per year. I think quarterly would be nice to try but costs increase and people with families might find them a bit more trouble that way.

* Daily team coffee calls. About 30 minutes long. Don't have to actually drink coffee. These are all individually optional, I try to make at least one per week and usually there's a few of us at any given one. We also use the donut slack bot which randomly matches 1:1 social calls once per week across the team.

* Culture fit is one of the key three areas we rate candidates on during hiring. Not everything above is what everyone wants out of a job and that's OK.

I agree with the other commenters here that work doesn't need to be the centre of your social life and team culture is not a replacement for work-life balance, but I also think knowing your team members beyond their email address builds better trust and trust is part of a highly effective team.

What we’ve been doing that has worked well for the last 2.5 years:

1. We do a weekly team meeting that has an open Q&A element to it. Whenever someone new joins the team, we ask them to do a self-intro sharing hobbies and interests and also a teardown or repair of an electronics product (really specific to us).

2. For regions where we have clusters of people, we bring them together occasionally for work and social activities.

3. We do regular workshops where we bring people together in person, with most of the time not covered by a set meeting agenda. This is massively useful for empathy-building and makes us more effective when remote.

4. We’ve reached a scale where we’re now also introducing random match 1:1s bi-weekly for people to connect with others who they normally wouldn’t (folks can opt out if they want to, but nobody has).

You might note that none of these activities (except the teardown) are deliberate culture-builders, but are instead about connection and empathy building. With connections and empathy, you have the scaffolding to make culture stick.

It's mostly "obvious" and you seem to already understand that, but it does take support from top to bottom of the organization. ex: ensure communication channels exist (mailing lists, slack/irc/etc); enable, encourage, and allow "water cooler" sort of discussions to occur on same; allow folks who don't wish to participate in those to opt out in some manner; periodic in-person meetings with work and "fun" team-building activities; zoom/video really should not be overused but good luck getting folks to understand that. MySQL (the company) did this very well; some of its offshoots have done it well occasionally.

Culture, culture, culture. It's universally cited as essential to an org's success, but... what exactly is the "culture" of a workplace?

I think an org has good culture if it has a good mission, the mission is communicated clearly and consistently throughout the org, people plan together thoughtfully for how best to execute the mission, and they execute their plans reliably and with respect for the time and effort of colleagues (e.g. reasonable questions and requests are answered in a courteous and timely fashion).

If all of that happens, I would rate the org culture as great, and people will naturally enjoy the company of their colleagues out of mutually earned respect.

None of this seems to have anything to do with getting together in person. You can set and communicate mission without being physically together, and you can plan thoughtfully without being physically together. And directed, thoughtful, and reliable people are great to work with whether it's in person or through a screen, and the opposite kind of person is also a pain regardless of the medium.

There are specific situations when being in-person can work better. I'm sure with very creative work, like developing a Disney movie, you sometimes want to get together to feed off each other's energy. But I don't think it's really that important in general. The important thing is everyone doing their jobs, and the people doing their jobs getting proportional recognition.

why do employees have to go through this bullshit anyways?

Edit: be direct about the fact that you are trying to help people develop communication skills.

In person heavy cultures only work for some people... like they tend to great for 20 somethings, with no kids, who drink, wan't to hang out at bars after work and can take a few days / a week for a retreat without putting a ton of child care burden on their partner if they have one. But if you have kids, or are serious about something outside or work (training for a sport, non profit or open source work, gardening or other hobby) they can be really hard.

Often people just overlook this bias and it works out okay since most people with outside commitments are well established in their careers and have figured out how to be productive and communicate even with people very different from them.

One of the great things about remote first companies is that you get a huge diversity of location, interest and life stage in employees. You get people with families, people serious about a sport they live where they can practice it, people running small farms or fixing up cabins in the mountains or living on aboat, people super active in non profits, always traveling etc...

You really need to lean in on this and encourage people to share their interests and interesting stories, bond over common interests when they are there but also develop the skills and empathy to work with people who are really different them. Like at my current job i totally chat with another outdoorsy middle aged guy with kids in a rural mountain state, but i've also developed a really good working relationship with a young woman in another country, mentor a young guy in a city etc and do regular virtual coffee catch ups with a number of ex coworkers some of whom i've never physically met.

This can be hardest to make work for new grads as for them often it is a choice between moving to a city where they don't know people or living at home...a lot of them do rely on work social networks as they get established. Many remote first companies only hire proven people. Game time and happy hours are ok but hard to make work across time zones.

The think i have seen work well is really focusing on communication skills as an official part of career development. Organize short public speaking / lightning talk / story telling / ted talk / moth radio hour style sessions focused on work and not work stuff. Share a story from your life, teach use something, share your current work in 2 minutes.

Rotating coffee one on ones, mentoring programs and paper reading groups can also work really well.

And like, just directly give people guidance on how to communicate better or let them know that is what you are trying to do.

Please do not run workplaces like a cult, and force people into things. You will face attrition otherwise.

Can you define specific, measurable goals that this "culture" is supposed to achieve? I know it's uncomfortable, especially for the gregarious, but there's no intrinsic reason that co-workers must be any more than that. Focus on the mission, aid each other in that, learn about each other from that. Ice-cream socials are great...if you like ice cream and being social. Yes, it helps if you know and like your co-workers. This can and should be encouraged, but cannot be forced.

This goes double for mandatory socializing on unpaid time :/

What are you actually trying to solve for? What does cultural cohesion look like?

In my experience, most companies are mismanaged and no amount of culture building addresses those issues.

If you want people to bond in a positive way, make work easier for them by ensuring they have clear goals, attainable timelines, and a path for career growth.

Otherwise cultural cohesion is built on people complaining about the company.

Maybe that’s actually figured out and your company is not a minefield of bs, in which case you are very lucky!

——

Something one of my employers did was start our weekly executive team meetings with everyone saying three words to describe how they’re feeling and why for each. We’d get things like “excited”, “stressed”, “annoyed” with an honest description why … which was a fantastic barometer of the company’s emotions for the week + a window into how everyone thinks and wants to be treated.

In our weekly all hands we’d start with everyone saying something they were anxious about and something they were excited about. Folks shared very personal stuff. It was sometimes hard to listen to people over share, but I knew more about people I hadn’t met in person in 6 months than i did folks I had worked with for several years.

People loved the culture there, and I did too. But there was still churn from mismanagement.

> deeply invested in vibrant in person culture.

What goal did they solve by having that culture? I've been in companies that focused on culture, and in ones that didn't give a crap as long as work got done. I did not see either direction as better or worse than the other, just different. It is also worth noting that every org has a culture, intentional or accidental. So the lack of personal events and friendship is the culture in some places.

Your statements that people need to connect and talk about work things is not a universal truth, but a preference. Being engaged with your co-workers and having friendships is not a requirement for a business to work, nor for a life to be fulfilling. So before you try to "fix" your org's culture... you might want to consider that they already have one, it just isn't the one you want.

Just let me do my job ffs. We can bond at the [whatever cadence] company retreat in person. Zoom happy hour is my personal hell.

I work at a well known remote company in tech. I would argue that the culture in my team is almost non-existent. There is very little socialising within the team, and many of the people, including the most tenured person, is usually too busy to even reply to a message on Slack, let alone get involved socially. I suppose people would refer to this as “leave me alone to do my work”.

However this has created an environment where there is less incentive to help out others, review their pull requests, help cover their on-call, or just give time to others in the team. The team operates on a very transactional basis (I need something from you) and little else.

I suppose some people quite enjoy that, but to me it has been very hard, and hurt my motivation to do good work.

At previous company, where we all worked in person, we all developed very strong friendships which still exist 5 years later, even thought some of us no longer work there. I don’t think I will ever get this at my current company.