10 tips to build a remote work culture

Organizations are grappling with the mounting challenge of keeping their employees motivated, committed, and energized. Reports show engagement and retention are dropping at alarming rates, and exhaustion is the new norm. According to a 2022 Deloitte survey, 55% of respondents have experienced burnout, and the workplace is the number one reported stressor.

To address employee burnout and eroding engagement rates, organizations should consider a strategy focused on human connection. Crystal Boysen, Chief People Officer at Vimeo, recently stated, “connecting with employees at a human level is more important than ever.”

Connection is critical for a thriving remote or hybrid work culture. Over 70 million workers believe their job can be done remotely, and 87% of Americans in a recent McKinsey survey would jump at the chance to do so. 

In order to keep up with remote work demands, employers need to be flexible and attuned. So, the big question is, how do you set your employees up for success with a remote and distributed workforce?

We talked with Crystal Boysen to get her perspective on how Vimeo approaches remote work today. If you’re looking to make your workplace and employee communications more effective in this new era, we have a quick primer on remote work along with recommendations on how to foster an inclusive and collaborative environment with video.

What is remote work?

A remote-first workplace allows employees to carry out their roles from outside a company office. Remote companies might ask some employees to come into the office (depending on their role) but allow flexibility for others.

Before 2020, remote work was often limited to freelancers, small business owners, or the rare digital nomad. But, by 2022, 87% of workers were doing some form of remote work and spent an average of 3.3 days a week working from home. 

Vimeo operated remotely for over two years, and when organizations reopened offices, we embraced a hybrid model. Certain staff (such as office facilities managers, receptionists, and IT support) come into the office full time, whereas others remain 100% remote. Close to half of our staff take on hybrid or flex roles, where they come into the office as often as they’d like, but there aren’t any dedicated days they need to come in. They simply get the flexibility to work the way that they work best.

Of course, since Vimeo’s team has both remote and hybrid employees, our workspace still remains 100% remote-first.

How to build a strong remote work culture 

To create a productive and inclusive remote office work culture that will fuel your company’s success, follow these steps.

1. Audit your existing work processes

The first step to building a strong remote team culture is to take a good, hard look at your current systems and processes. Ask yourself:

• What do your company’s decision-making structures look like? 
• How are teams held accountable to goals? 
• How are individuals celebrated? 
• How do you keep information flowing across the entire company? 
• Where can employees go to find the details that they need?
• Does your company have remote onboarding resources to set new hires up for success?

In many ways, making a sudden shift to remote work can expose deficiencies in your organizational processes. Fortunately, once you’ve explored how every system in your company operates, you can identify gaps to work on.

For example, your organization might find that going remote helps teams build better organizational documentation and use consistent decision-making processes.

2. Set up rules of engagement

Great team cultures don’t happen accidentally, so make sure to take the time to outline and communicate what you want your remote workplace culture to look like. At Vimeo, we really prize flexibility and inclusion, so we’ve set up rules of engagement that reflect that.

In terms of flexibility, Vimeo created both hybrid and remote roles that let employees work the way that they do best. In surveys, employees said they enjoy things like extra time in the morning to spend with family or getting children ready for school. Being able to skip their daily commute increased their mental health. And since it’s important at Vimeo that employees feel good as human beings, not just employees, that flexibility became really important to our remote work culture.

Inclusion is also built into our rules of engagement. In a hybrid environment, it can be easy for remote workers to feel like second-class citizens, so setting rules that make sure everyone feels valued and included is important.

For instance, if there’s a meeting of any type, all in-office employees should consider joining a video call on their laptops, from separate rooms. This helps ensure that remote employees don’t feel left out of group conversations.

Because remote work can so easily bleed into people’s home lives, it’s also helpful to set rules that help employees create boundaries around work. That might mean company-wide, meeting-free afternoons to combat Zoom burnout and let people focus on their work. Employees can also set their calendars so that all meetings end 10 minutes before the hour, so that no one gets stuck in back-to-back meetings.

3. Prioritize belonging

Fostering a sense of belonging at work is essential for keeping good employees. In fact, recent McKinsey research suggests lack of belonging in the workplace is one of the top three reasons workers leave.

At Vimeo, we believe the foundation of a business is its people — and we want each team member to feel safe and supported when they show up authentically. 

We love to encourage a sense of belonging from day one. Every new team member is asked to create a short “about me” video. They can share anything they’d like with the team, including hobbies, pictures of family or pets, and any interesting facts. 

Ultimately, learning fun things about each other’s lives outside of work helps to build meaningful connections and set the stage for a more engaging workplace. 

4. Invest in tools that support remote collaboration

To work well from a distance, employees need to be able to collaborate with one another just as easily from home as they do in the office. That requires specialized tools that promote intentional communication.

For easy workplace communication day to day, Vimeo uses Vimeo Record to record videos and screengrabs for coworkers and clients, and we store and organize all of our videos (including town halls, employee trainings, and team meetings) in our video library. This allows teams to better communicate asynchronously to keep everyone up to date. 

For other collaboration across teams, Vimeo uses Slack and Zoom. We also use an online design and collaboration app, Figjam, which allows teams to brainstorm and collaborate on projects asynchronously. We’ve also invested in a platform that allows us to share our goals, objectives, and key results. That way, we can all align our priorities and make sure we’re working toward the same goals.

5. Increase your focus on communication

So much internal communication happens throughout the workday in an office, and it’s really important not to lose that when you go remote. It might not be very sexy or cool, but upping your asynchronous communication and documentation game is essential when building a remote company culture.

When Vimeo first went remote, it was important to increase the frequency of our communication in order to avoid falling into siloes, so we started running our virtual all-hands meetings — which we call “State of the Vimeo” — more often. This helped ensure that everyone was consistently on the same page. We also made sure to keep the content engaging and interactive by using our live streaming feature and allowing employees to respond with emojis, cheers, and questions and comments throughout the meetings.

Of course, on the other side of communication is documentation: we also realized we needed to become really good at documenting everything, from our meeting minutes to project updates to decisions made. So, we overhauled our intranet site and made it easy for everyone to find and access the information they needed.

As an example, Vimeo brought on the first internal communications hire during COVID-19. With teams far more dispersed than they’d been before, it’s important to have dedicated resources to ensure information flows freely between departments and over 1,000 employees.

6. Train leaders to manage teams remotely

What we’ve learned is that managing remote teams requires different skills than managing in-person teams. When we first moved to a remote work culture, some of our managers struggled with the transition, and we realized we needed to do more to support them.

To help leaders become better remote managers, start by thinking through what you want your remote environment to look like, and then provide support for people managers to reach that level of success. For us, that meant providing training and building out a hybrid work playbook for your team leaders and managers.

A playbook can touch on all aspects of managing a team remotely — including how to set a good example of setting communication boundaries, how to run effective meetings remotely, and what proper email etiquette looks like.

7. Check the pulse of your remote team with surveys

Every remote employee faces their own set of challenges and needs. That’s why it’s critical to listen to what they have to say. With remote employees, feedback allows you to understand these complexities and highlights potential issues within their unique work environment.

Surveys, for instance, can provide insight into what resources would help remote employees do their best work, uncover ideas to help improve their efficiency, and offer solutions to any issues they may have. 

At Vimeo, we surveyed 1,300 of our employees to see if we were moving the needle and delivering the intended impact. To gauge our ‘people impact,’ we asked questions like, “Would you recommend our team to a colleague or friend?” and “Do you believe we produce high-quality work?” We also asked for feedback on our programs, our products, and our services. This ongoing dialogue allows us to continually refine our approach, better support our remote workforce, and drive our collective success.

Beyond just identifying problems, these surveys serve as pulse check-ins on employee morale and satisfaction. Importantly, they communicate to your remote team that their voices matter.

Our annual engagement survey was quite an eye-opener about how much employees value learning and development. We saw a lot of comments like “It’s really important to me that Vimeo is a place where I can grow and develop my career.” Our exit survey data also revealed that a perceived lack of development opportunities was a key factor in employee turnover.  

8. Prioritize connection and collaboration

When we polled our employees after moving to a remote work culture, the number one thing that they said they missed was a sense of connection to their colleagues. The personal connection and community that you can foster fairly organically in a physical office require much more intentionality when everyone is remote.

For Vimeo, that meant finding ways to proactively bring folks together. There were lots of ideas on fostering new ways to spark connection and build camaraderie remotely, including:

• Having new employees create a quick “about me” video where they introduce themselves, share their hobbies, and pictures of family or pets.
• Launching a #CoffeeDate channel in our Slack, which pairs coworkers once a month for 30-minute virtual coffee dates. 
• Creating a #ShoutOut channel in Slack where employees can give kudos to anyone in the organization.
• Giving teams budgets for online team-building activities, such as trivia nights or art classes.

9. Empower employees to show up as their authentic selves

One thing that’s important to us is creating an environment where employees feel like they can show up as their authentic selves at work. When you allow your employees to truly be themselves, you ignite their creativity, drive engagement, and ultimately inspire them to bring their best to the table, which fuels collective success.

Prioritize nurturing an open and inclusive culture and create opportunities for open dialogue so that employees feel comfortable sharing their perspectives.

At Vimeo, we’ve had a lot of success in hosting our virtual all-hands meetings on very specific topics. We ask employees to express their ideas, preferences, and work-related concerns. We end each all-hands with open Q&A to encourage candid feedback.

We also host town halls that are less structured, with open mics for employees to express support or share their concerns.

Through these channels, we strive to maintain authenticity, inclusivity, and open dialogue. 

10. Provide opportunities for growth and learning

One of the primary benefits of remote work is the flexibility it allows for employees to learn and grow. This flexibility extends to scheduling, which lets employees balance work with personal needs and interests. Remote work also opens up opportunities for employees to learn at their own pace and in their preferred environment. This can lead to a more engaged, satisfied, and productive workforce.

You can support this learning by giving employees the tools, resources, and support they need to grow in their roles. This could include offering online courses, workshops, or mentorship programs.

Create an engaged, inclusive, and flexible remote culture

If you’ve traditionally operated as an in-office work culture, it can be challenging to shift to a remote-first work model. However, with intentionality and dedication, you can build an environment that supports all of your employees — no matter where they log in.

Discover how to improve employee communications for your remote team

Originally published on October 6, 2022, and updated in June 16, 2023.