18 Ways to Build Strong Company Culture in Remote Work: Expert Advice

Write things down. That is the whole answer, and it is unglamorous enough that most teams skip it in favor of virtual socials.

I led a globally distributed team across product, engineering, and business development, spread across enough time zones that there was no hour when everyone was awake. In that setup, culture is not the vibe in a video call. It is whether someone in a different time zone can find out what was decided, why, and by whom, without waiting eight hours to ask.

When decisions live in calls and DMs, two things happen and both corrode the team. People in the wrong time zone are structurally excluded from context, so they slowly become executors rather than contributors. And whoever talks to the founder most becomes the de facto source of truth, which is how remote companies rebuild office politics without an office.

So the practice: decisions get written where everyone can read them, with the reasoning, not just the outcome. Reasoning matters more than the decision, because it is what lets someone disagree usefully later or apply the same logic to a case you did not anticipate.

What it improved was not warmth, it was autonomy. People stopped waiting for permission because they could see how calls were being made. That is the cohesion that actually matters when you are distributed. Everyone pulling toward the same thing without needing to be in the same room.

The thing I would skip: mandatory fun. Forced social hours across time zones mean someone is always joining at a bad hour to perform enthusiasm. Give people clarity and control over their day, and the goodwill takes care of itself.

Agency work concentrates knowledge in whoever owns the account, and remote work hardens that concentration into silos nobody can see through.

We started rotating who leads the client call every quarter. Not ownership, just the call. The person who normally sits quiet on the technical side runs the conversation while the account lead listens.

The first few were rough. People found out fast how much context they’d been coasting on.

Speaking of that, the cohesion came from what happened after. Someone who has run a client call understands why the account lead pushes back on scope, and the account lead who watched someone else run it hears their own account through fresh ears. The empathy runs both directions and it doesn’t come from a team-building exercise.

Coverage improved too. When someone takes leave now, the handover takes an hour instead of a week.

Tibicle’s name comes from Tea and Cubicle. The idea behind it was always that the best work happens when people feel connected to each other, not just to their tasks. Building that remotely requires more deliberate effort than most founders expect.

The most effective thing we did was create moments that had nothing to do with client delivery. Internal experiments like our AI versus Designer battle where the whole team watched one of our designers compete head to head against an AI tool on a live brief. Nobody had to attend. Everyone did. The conversation that followed lasted days and taught us more about how our team thinks about AI than any training session could have.

Culture in a remote or hybrid environment does not come from policies about camera-on meetings or virtual coffee chats nobody wants. It comes from shared experiences people genuinely remember.

The improvement in cohesion showed up practically. When a developer hits a blocker at 2pm and needs help from a colleague they have laughed with, they ask immediately. When they only know that colleague through sprint tasks, they hesitate. That hesitation costs hours. Shared experiences outside of work context remove it.

Build moments worth remembering. Everything else follows from that.

The most effective way I have found to build a strong remote culture is to help people understand how their colleagues actually think and solve problems. Remote employees may speak regularly in meetings but still have little understanding of what people outside their immediate role know or when they should involve them.

To solve this, we introduced short rotating problem walkthroughs between people from different parts of the company. Each person brings one real challenge they recently handled and explains the situation, the decision they made, and what they learned from the result.

Because the discussion is based on real work, it feels more useful than a virtual coffee meeting or another team-building activity. At the same time, it gives employees a clearer picture of each other’s skills, responsibilities, and decision-making styles.

Over time, people began contacting the right colleague earlier because they knew who had experience with a specific problem. This improved handoffs between roles, reduced repeated work, and made asking for help feel more natural.

The biggest improvement in team cohesion came from replacing assumptions with familiarity. People were no longer just names in a group chat; they understood what each colleague could contribute and started treating challenges as shared problems rather than individual tasks.

The foundation of our remote culture is a statement we use often: “Never apologize for living a life, but don’t make excuses for not delivering results.”

That principle creates the right balance between flexibility and accountability. We are a results-oriented company, so we focus on outputs rather than inputs. We do not measure commitment by where someone sits, how many hours they appear online, or how often they are on video. We measure it by whether they take ownership, do the work, and deliver results.

At the same time, we genuinely want people to have lives they enjoy. Remote work should provide flexibility, and no one should feel guilty for using it. But flexibility works only when it is paired with a strong work ethic, personal accountability, and care for the team.

That philosophy also shapes who we hire. We look for high-performing, self-motivated people who value autonomy but understand the responsibility that comes with it. As an entrepreneur, I appreciate that balance personally. I work hard, care deeply about the outcome, and make sure the work gets done, while also valuing the flexibility to manage my life.

We are intentional about keeping people connected without overwhelming them with meetings. We hold weekly executive and team meetings, bring employees together in person several times a year, and use larger monthly Teams calls followed by smaller breakout groups. We also avoid unnecessary video calls because they can be exhausting and reduce focus.

This approach has strengthened team cohesion because people trust that they will be treated like adults, and they understand that trust comes with an expectation to deliver.

Our U.S. team is remote, while our offices in Europe and China work in person. The remote model has been especially successful in the U.S. because it allows us to hire the best people for each role, rather than limiting ourselves to candidates who live near Chicago.

A strong remote culture is not created through more monitoring. It comes from hiring the right people, setting clear expectations, creating meaningful connection, and holding everyone accountable for results.

As a company with remote teams in 30-plus countries, we knew early on that culture had to be the foundation everything else stood on. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and candidly, before we even started this company, that was the one thing we were sure about. It would define how we built everything else.

We hold to Maya Angelou’s wisdom here: people remember how you made them feel, long after they’ve forgotten what was said. So twice every month, our entire global team gets on Zoom together, not for a formal update, but to actually see each other. We share business updates, sure, but we also do icebreakers and games, and a short fifteen-minute session where someone teaches the group a new skill or idea. People leave with a few things: excitement, from the fun segments and games, learning, from the skill or update they picked up, and a sense of being valued, because they have had a platform to ask anything that’s been on their mind, or just stay in the loop on what’s happening across the company.

Beyond that, we do monthly one-on-one check-ins with HR and quarterly check-ins with leadership. But people also just need to feel remembered. Something as simple as sending everyone a birthday cake, and then sharing the cake photos in our team chat, does more for that than people expect. We live by the idea that work takes up the biggest part of your life, so it should be something you look forward to, not something you dread.

Furthermore, we do two to three meetups a year in team members’ local countries, where they get to meet in person and take part in community service together to build a shared sense of purpose. When you do a good deed, it doesn’t just help others. It helps you too. And this experience creates a special relationship among colleagues that goes beyond work.

The most effective way I have found to build a strong company culture in a remote or hybrid environment is to make operating norms explicit.

In an office, people often learn culture informally by observing how others communicate, make decisions, handle conflict, or support customers. In a distributed environment, those signals are weaker. If the company does not define expectations clearly, every team creates its own habits, and collaboration becomes inconsistent.

The practice that helped most was documenting how we work together: communication channels, response expectations, meeting rules, decision ownership, escalation paths, and how progress should be reported. This sounds simple, but it prevents many small frictions from becoming cultural problems.

For example, we clarified which topics required live discussion and which should be handled asynchronously. Routine updates moved into written formats, while live meetings were reserved for decisions, blockers, and cross-functional alignment. We also made ownership visible, so people knew who could decide, who needed to be consulted, and when to escalate.

This improved team cohesion because people spent less energy interpreting behavior. A delayed response was not automatically seen as disengagement. A written update was not seen as avoiding collaboration. Teams had a common understanding of how work moved forward.

I also believe leaders must create intentional moments for connection, not only task coordination. Remote culture becomes weak when every interaction is transactional.

My principle is that culture in a hybrid company cannot depend on physical proximity. It has to be designed through trust, clarity, accountability, and consistent rituals that help people feel connected while still allowing focused work.

Building culture remotely

Over-communicating context. Not more meetings, more reasoning.

In an office, people absorb the why by osmosis, overheard calls, hallway conversations, watching how a decision gets made. Remote strips all of that out, and most companies replace it with status updates, which is the least useful part of what people were absorbing.

What I do instead is share the reasoning behind decisions, including the uncomfortable ones. Why we priced something a certain way. Why we turned down a client. What I’m actually worried about this quarter. Not gossip, context.

The difference it makes is that people stop waiting to be told what to do. When someone understands why a decision was made, they can make the next ten related decisions themselves without checking in. That’s what cohesion actually looks like in practice, not team-building activities, but a team that can move without me in the room.

The trap is treating culture as something you schedule. Culture is mostly the accumulated residue of how decisions get made and explained. Get that right and you don’t need much else.

We call it “strong company culture” when people understand each other’s work and are respectful of that, especially when it is a hybrid work environment, or even remote. I have found that virtual job-shadowing sessions go a long way in building the foundations towards that kind of deep understanding.

Working as a people development leader in the AECO industry, I started monthly “work window” sessions to introduce a non-traditional method of team building. In these sessions, I suggested that a team simply observe another team solve real project challenges for thirty minutes straight. Seeing their co-workers collaborate and fix problems within the workplace helped replace assumptions with context for many.

The visible results? Cross-functional requests becoming smoother and project handoffs requiring far fewer number of clarifications. Team members could gain the confidence to reach out to unfamiliar colleagues because of the already established foundation of respect and understanding. When curiosity replaces distance and misunderstandings, workplaces become far more enjoyable all around.

One thing we’ve learned is that company culture doesn’t grow through meetings about culture. It grows through everyday interactions.

In a remote environment, we intentionally create opportunities for people to connect outside of project work. We have Speaking Clubs, celebrate personal milestones, organize company events, and encourage employees to host internal sessions about topics they’re genuinely interested in. None of this is mandatory, and that’s important. People join because they want to, which makes the interactions feel authentic rather than forced.

The biggest difference we’ve noticed is in how people work together afterward. It’s much easier to ask a colleague for help, share an early idea, or have an honest conversation when you’ve already connected on a personal level. Informal conversations also help us spot concerns that might never come up in a scheduled one-on-one. Over time, that has strengthened trust across teams and made remote work feel much less isolating.

Most advice on remote culture is about adding things. Virtual coffees, values workshops, more offsites, a Slack channel for pets. None of it is bad, but it treats culture as a set of activities you bolt on, and that is not what culture is. Culture is whether people actually feel connected to each other and to something shared. In an office, that connection built itself in the hallways and the hundred small unspoken moments. Remote quietly removed all of that, and no amount of scheduled fun replaces it.

So the most effective thing I have found is not another ritual. It is making connection something you can actually see and tend, instead of hoping it survives the distance.

When people share a room, their nervous systems sync without anyone trying. You feel when someone checks out, when trust is fraying, when a decision did not really land. Remote strips that sense away and leaves you guessing. A team can look fine on every dashboard and be quietly coming apart, because the signals we used to read in a body are gone.

Through the Coherence Method and my partnership with Syneurgy, an AI-powered social neurotechnology platform, we read the physiological and behavioral signals of whether a team is genuinely connected, trust, psychological safety, whether people are truly with each other or just appearing on the call. For the first time, the thing we used to only feel is visible, even across time zones. That means culture stops being a vibe you hope for and becomes something you can actually notice slipping and repair before it breaks.

How it improved cohesion was simple but profound. We stopped guessing. Instead of discovering months later that someone had checked out or that two people were quietly at odds, we could see the drift early and address it while it was small. People stopped performing connection and started building the real thing, because it was no longer invisible and therefore no longer easy to ignore.

If I could offer one principle: stop trying to manufacture culture with activities and start protecting the actual connection underneath it. Ask, honestly and often, whether your people are genuinely with each other or just co-located on a screen. In a room you could feel the answer. Remote, you have to make it deliberate.

Because in the end, culture is not the events on the calendar. It is whether people trust each other enough to think and struggle and build as one. That was always true. Distance just made it impossible to fake.

One of the biggest misconceptions about remote and hybrid work is that culture comes from spending time together. In my experience, culture comes from clarity and trust, not proximity.

The most effective practice I’ve seen is ensuring every team member understands what’s expected of them and that they’re in a role that aligns with their natural strengths. When people have clear responsibilities, the right competencies for the job, and confidence in one another’s abilities, collaboration becomes much easier, whether they’re sitting in the same office or working across time zones.

At Hiring Indicators, we encourage organizations to define the competencies that matter most for remote success, things like Accountability, Clear Communication, Planning and Execution, Learning Agility, and Interpersonal Savvy. Those competencies become the foundation for hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance conversations.

A great example is onboarding. Rather than giving every new hire the same experience, managers who understand an employee’s competency profile can tailor how they communicate, provide feedback, and support development. Some people thrive with autonomy from day one, while others benefit from more structured check-ins. That flexibility helps employees feel supported without feeling micromanaged.

The result is stronger team cohesion because people know what they can rely on each other for. Trust isn’t built through more meetings. It’s built when everyone consistently delivers, communicates well, and understands how their work contributes to the team’s success.

The thing that moved the needle for us was cutting out the middle layer. We are a five person team building Webflow sites for B2B SaaS companies, and everyone talks to clients directly. No account manager relaying messages, no internal translation step. That sounds like an operational choice, but it is really a cultural one, because it tells people we trust them with the relationship and not just the task.

The second thing was making work visible instead of asking people to report on it. We do not run status meetings. Changes go live and the whole team sees them, so progress is obvious without anyone writing an update about it. That removed a lot of the low grade anxiety that comes with remote work, where you feel you have to prove you were busy.

Cohesion improved because people stopped performing work and just did it. When someone is stuck, they say so early, because nobody is protecting a status report.

The company that I founded in 1991, and which I still lead 35 years later, went fully remote in 1997, so about 23 years before Covid taught us all that a fully remote business could still be a legitimate business.

The most effective way that we’ve found to build a strong company culture is through accountabilities written in objective, measurable language. We learned this by implementing the Entrepreneur’s Operating System (EOS), popularized by the book, “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business”. I’m not a fan of most business books as they’re 400 pages of fluff and should be two pages in pamphlet form. But EOS is different, and I have no affiliation with it other than being a user.

EOS teaches that no one can stay focused on a task for more than 90-days, so annual goals are non-existent at the individual level. Instead, the year is divided into four quarters, with each person getting a few rocks (goals). Each week, their entire team meets to review progress and typically each person gets a few to-do items to accomplish within a couple of weeks, and those flow directly out of the rocks.

When everyone is accountable and objectives are clear, miscommunication is minimized, as is the need for meeting after meeting just to get everyone on the same page. Stress is reduced, and collaboration is increased.

Document how the team actually works, don’t leave it to hallway osmosis. In hybrid setups, that’s the single biggest lever.

We use a simple framework: energy, commitment, and focus. Which means these three questions: does someone have the drive for their work? are they actually committed to it? and can they get absorbed in it? Naming those three separately means managers stop guessing and start having specific conversations instead of vague “how are you doing” check-ins.

Once that’s written down and consistent, remote teams stop feeling like people who happen to log in from different cities, and start feeling like they’re working off the same playbook. That’s what actually drives cohesion, not the tools, not the perks, the shared system underneath it.

One way I’ve used to encourage my team to help one another is through weekly meetings. This is the time I set for our remote workers to see and hear what each one of us says in real time. I don’t make it rigid, as we discuss different topics concerning our company, and everyone is given the floor to speak. This has helped us to familiarize ourselves and trust one another, making it simpler to collaborate.

What I like most about these virtual meetings is that the conversations feel natural, meaning that everyone feels free to speak on any issue that concerns them or initiate discussions on something that might benefit all of us. This kind of attitude is contagious and makes us more active during these sessions. This is just a fraction of what they do because, after that, we become eager to collaborate on different projects.

We all look forward to participating in these interfaces. This has helped to unite all of us to work towards the common goal of the company. Of course, in rare circumstances, a few employees are absent for various good reasons.

There has never been a time that made me realize that these meetings were not important in encouraging our employees to see themselves as one team. They always share insights and help one another, even on some simple tasks.

The most effective culture move we made was changing who we hire.

We stopped looking for specialists in content, ops, or sales who would stay in their lane. We started hiring people who were willing to learn automation and AI workflows, even if they had no technical background. That single shift changed how the team operates and how people connect across time zones.

Here’s what happened. We had a content person who was good at writing but manually copying press releases between systems every day. We taught her n8n basics. Within two weeks, she built a workflow that took over the repetitive part. She stayed focused on the writing that required judgment, and the automation handled the rest. She started sharing what she learned with two other team members. They began building their own workflows.

That created a different dynamic. People were solving their own problems instead of waiting for someone else to fix them. They started helping each other without being asked. When someone hit a roadblock in an automation, another team member who had solved something similar would jump in. Culture started building around shared capability, not shared office space.

We now have 12 people across India, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe. None of them sit in the same room. But they all speak the same language when it comes to how work gets done. They can look at a task, decide if it should be automated, and either build it themselves or describe exactly what they need someone else to build.

The cohesion comes from the fact that everyone is working on the same type of problem. It’s not content versus ops versus sales. It’s all process design. That makes collaboration feel natural because the skills overlap. A salesperson can look at a lead qualification workflow and understand what the ops person built. An ops person can look at a content pipeline and suggest improvements.

Remote work fails when people are isolated in separate functions with no shared context. Automation gives us that context. It’s the common ground that holds the team together.

Inclusivity is essential when it comes to building a cohesive team environment alongside remote workers. This can be more challenging when using traditional video conferencing software, but there are plenty of measures that you can take to keep all of your workers feeling engaged at all times.

The first and most important step to take is to never leave your remote staff out of the loop when it comes to important company decisions. Even if you’re considering what default software to adopt in the office, allowing remote workers to share their insights can help them to feel more a part of the company, promoting greater loyalty levels and paving the way for stronger integrations within teams.

You should also include your remote and hybrid employees when it comes to typical business practices such as anonymous feedback, ideas for social activities, and suggestions for improving workflows.

Even if they’re based on the other side of the world, including everyone in key decision-making activities means that your workers can feel better connected to the company and their colleagues.