The Unspoken Rules of Remote Culture

The best remote teams are resilient and contrary to popular belief, remote teams are not disappearing. Look at websites like WeWorkRemotely or RemoteOk and you will see significant positions in companies around the world. The reason organizations are reigning in remote teams has to do with a lack of following the unspoken rules of remote culture, and when you do not follow these rules, you lose the value of remote teams, and the individuals you hire.

I have had the pleasure of being part of a remote team both as a member and leader, and I can undoubtedly write that my squad was resilient by following these unspoken rules.

Regardless of your rank in the organization, to foster resilient remote teams, you need to understand and encourage these five unspoken rules which will connect your people to your culture, and in turn generate sustainable success. If you are not thinking this way, consider factory failure: the attempt to optimize your people and your prices to maximize profits, until you have lost all value in those people and products, which made you a standout in the market in the first place.

Human connection is a remote team’s entire success, and that connection is defined, built, and maintained entirely digitally. Meaning the team member has to engage in at least two times the emotional effort. On the one hand, they need to engage with their direct team members, on the other, they need to train teammates in physical spaces who may not have the capabilities, tools or interest to communicate digitally. In turn, this translates to double the effort for both people regardless of being remote, centralized, or co-located. When you have a team in an office, you have control over their daily interactions by designing the physical space to leverage communication and connection. In a digital area, you are providing freedom, so it requires more engagement and effort to build a culture by all members of the team. Forming connection in the digital space occurs by fostering more communication channels, engaging on an individual basis, group basis, focusing on having soft conversations (how was your weekend) interspersed with hard discussions (what is the scope of that project) plus leveraging and testing new technologies at every chance.

Outcomes are the only point. The best invention in the 50’s would have been a weight, sweat, and heat sensor in your office chair that kept a green light visible in your manager’s office. Unfortunately, this mental model is utterly useless in a digital space and among remote teams. In fact, I would venture to say that even in the 50’s the companies that put more emphasis on outcomes versus individual performance metrics based on low-value data points, fared better in the evolution of our economies. Team outcomes are the only measurement of value; everything else is most likely creating more harm and wasted energy. Remote teams are provided with a level of freedom intrinsically; therefore, the approach to leading or being a member shifts towards understanding workload, behavior, and emotion. Time is still a significant factor that needs management (this is not the wild west), but flexibility in exchange for outcomes is far more beneficial. I don’t know what hours the most successful people in history worked, but I can assure you that the only thing we collectively care about is their outcomes.

Earning trust is simple when you have a connection paired with visible outcomes and a successful remote team emphasizes trust. When self-driving cars are the norm, we are going to have to trust that the total components are going to achieve the outcome successfully. It is very much the same with a remote team. Since you are not face-to-face for the entire duration of the day, you have to trust that your teammates are carrying out their tasks and working collectively toward the common goal. Trust is inherently fragile, so it needs to be cultivated, and it needs to be monitored by the entire unit. When trust is an issue, it needs to be brought about immediately and resolved.

Honesty is key. “Hey, I am going out to lunch with my Mom today, I am going to be out a bit longer than usual because of it. Is that OK?” Wow, what a thought? Can someone say something like this to their team and leads? The answer is “Absolutely!”. If you trust someone, if they are connected with you, and are achieving outcomes, why can’t we get honest with ourselves and accept that we aren’t running at 110% for a straight stretch and a break when the steam is exhausted is a reality? Building this type of honest relationship allows for flexibility, but it also shows that your teammate respects your time. Being honest with your teammates is essential to the success of remote teams because it is a window into the accessibility and workings of your unit and eliminates the need for helicopter management styles. Trust and honesty go hand in hand.

Ownership motivates and you need to provide it to your teammates or ask for it from your lead. If supplied with complete control of a task, process, or project, you are most likely very engaged and to create engagement with remote teams, this is important. Ownership is the step after involvement when building motivation. If you can gain participation from the organization and provide ownership in pieces to the team, you have a more connected group of individuals who will begin to create more connection through conversations, in turn moving items over the finish line because they have a vested passion and interest in seeing it delivered successfully. If you want to have or be part of a remote team, try and erase the cog mentality and look at focusing on continuous improvement until autonomous and then move yourself or people into the next major challenge or opportunity worth tackling. Accepting monotony is the explicit path to mediocrity.

Overall, remote teams are ghosts at a party, and that means you need to try a lot harder to make it feel like one. If you can amplify the things that work for your physically located high-value teams, you will be a success.

The five unspoken rules (human connection, outcomes, trust, honesty, ownership) are just a few considerations for a remote team. Put thought into enjoyment (fun), flexibility, physical meet-ups, blended work weeks (2 in office, 3 out) and get creative with your team on how to make things work for everyone. It is critical to remind yourself that tools do not define success. Simply put, a hammer does not build a house, the people who use it do.