How to Build a Strong Remote Team Culture on Purpose

Welcome to episode 46 of The Eric Dingler Podcast, formerly the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur Podcast. I’m Eric, your host, and I really appreciate the fact that you’re here. Today I’m in the middle of a series, the top five questions I get asked about leading a remote team. Last episode, episode 45, we talked about how do I build trust with a remote team? Today we’re answering, how do I create a strong remote team culture? The next three episodes are going to tackle how do I measure performance in a remote team, how do I onboard new team members effectively, and what do I actually say and ask in weekly one on one team meetings.

That last one is a great one. It took some time to adjust, because I have over 25 years of experience building, training, and leading in-person teams. Fifteen years at a summer camp, ten years in local church ministry, paid teams, volunteer teams, all kinds of teams, but always in person until five years ago, when I pivoted to leading a 100% remote team. I had to adjust my leadership. What was working in in-person team leadership wasn’t getting me the same results with a remote team.

A lot of people struggle pivoting to a remote or hybrid team, and a lot of companies just say, this doesn’t work, we’re bringing everybody back to the office. Well, the thing is, you can’t say it doesn’t work. It does work. It may not work for you, but it’s not a people issue. In leadership, rarely is it a people issue. It’s 99.9% of the time a systems issue. In fact, there are five core business systems you need in place for your business to grow, and the first one is leadership, because your business will never outgrow the capacity of your leadership. Your leadership is the capacity of your business. John Maxwell says everything rises and falls on leadership, and he’s right. The other systems, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management, tend to get the most attention. But when you want your business to grow and excel, you have to grow as a leader. That’s what I want to help you do with this podcast.

So today I’ve got three things to cover: the content, which is five things about building a culture, then a list of ideas from things we do or have done with my own team at In Transit Studios, and then a leadership axiom. These are statements about leadership that sometimes sound a little cliche, but they’re designed to be memorable, because memorable is portable. Then I’ll wrap up with a travel update, since I missed it last episode. If you’re new to the podcast, my family and I are full time travelers. This podcast started out as the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur Podcast, and I used to open by talking about travel. My audience grew to the point that when I surveyed them, most people weren’t listening for the travel side, they were listening for the leadership side. So I moved the travel update to the end, for the folks who still travel full time or want to.

All right, let’s jump into today’s content. How do I create a strong remote team culture?

Number one, you have to decide and describe. You have to decide what culture is to you, what your company culture is going to look like, and you have to be able to describe it. Culture is everything around it, language, entertainment, how people interact, that intangible atmosphere, the energy in a space. The culture of Rome is different than the culture of Budapest, which is different than Liverpool, which is different than Costa Rica or Lima, Peru, which is different from Santa Rosa, Peru. For a company, you have to decide what kind of culture you’re going to have. Are you going to be laid back? Are your people going to have personal relationships with one another? I wouldn’t go as far as to try to create a family. Most families have dysfunction. People aren’t looking for family. You want a team, one that’s moving together toward a shared vision, on the same mission, living according to shared core values. That’s a little of what I talked about in episode 45.

You get to decide your culture, and here’s the thing, don’t let anybody tell you you’re right or wrong. Don’t let yourself be bullied into changing your mind about culture. If you want a company where people show up, do their job, keep their mouth shut, go home, and you send them a paycheck, go ahead and create that company. It’s your company. You get to decide. If you want a company where, how I’d describe it, people skip to work. They’re excited, ready to go. Not because it’s better than their home life, I want them to enjoy going home too. I want my team to walk away from work satisfied and turn to their family and say, I’m here now for you. Let’s have experiences together. I wanted my team excited to come to work, to enjoy what they’re doing, to share in the success, to have fun, to know about their teammates even though they’ve never met them in person.

In an in-person team, this happens pretty naturally. Somebody in the office creates culture. You can let it happen and have no control over what you end up with, or you can define it and make it happen. So decide and describe. If you can’t describe the culture you want, you’re never going to achieve it. Take time to answer, what do I want it to feel like for people who come to work here? There’s not a right answer or a wrong answer here. Well, I take that back, if your answer is oppressive, that’s a wrong answer, nobody’s going to work for you very long. But otherwise there’s no one right way to do this. Give yourself permission, and don’t worry about what you see other companies doing on social media. If you keep trying to recreate what some big company has, who cares, good for them, I’m excited for them, but that’s not what I’m creating over here. If I liked their thing so much, I’d just go join their staff. Make your thing the thing you want it to be.

Number two, you have to establish core values that achieve it. When you describe your culture, ask yourself, what has to happen for that to be true? What needs to happen for that to exist? Some of those answers become your core values. One place that’s done this really well is the Ramsey organization, they have some great core values. Hobby Lobby has some great core values. Tesla has some fun, great core values too. There are tons of great examples out there. You’ve got to create core values that protect the culture you described.

Number three, you have to decide to now create the culture. It’s not going to happen by accident, it has to be done with intentionality. The greatest catalyst to culture in a company is language. You have to create a shared language. Culture trumps vision. Whatever your vision is, the culture of your organization determines whether that vision is achievable, enjoyable to achieve, and whether it brings the right people together and excites them while repelling the wrong people. Your culture determines the journey to, and the success of, your vision. And the greatest carrier of culture is language.

So how do you create a shared language? We have daily updates, not project updates, not scrum updates, daily updates. The first time somebody uses a different word for it, we correct it right away. There’s a reason for the name, whoever owns the ball on a project gives an update every single day. If you call them project updates, when do you make them? You don’t know. That’s where drift starts.

When we onboard a new team member, and I mean any new team member, this last week my wife officially joined the team. She’s always been a co-owner, but she’s now claiming her role, focused on admin and team alignment and culture. I’m so excited about it. But she’s going through the exact same onboarding every other team member goes through. We have a self-guided, do it yourself training and onboarding system, because I don’t have time to stop doing my work to train someone on theirs, and nobody on the team has time to stop and teach someone our project management system one-on-one. Every new team member goes through Hive University, since Hive is our project management system, along with first generation training on every tool we use. Why does that matter? Because it prevents somebody developing a bad habit, teaching it to the next person, who teaches it to the next person, and three or four generations down the road you’ve got dysfunction multiplied and you’re wondering why nobody’s doing it the way you said to. It’s because they weren’t trained first generation. Language is critically important to creating culture. Put your system in a framework, teach it, this is what we do, this is how we do it, these are our core values, this is how we say it. That’s what starts to create and carry culture.

The second piece here, you have to tell people. Tell them, this is what we’re about, this is what I want it to be like, this is what you should be experiencing, and if you’re not, let me know, because I want reality to match the ideal. You need feedback loops on this, and you need to be regularly checking in.

Third, you’re going to have events around culture, events designed to bolster the culture you want, and these don’t have to be standalone events. When I have a leadership team meeting, we start with an icebreaker question. I’ve got a list of fifty, sixty of them at this point. What was your favorite Christmas gift you ever received? What’s your favorite candy bar and why? If you were a superhero, what would it be? Why do I do that? Because I’m capturing information and helping create connections. Somebody hears somebody else’s answer and goes, oh, I like that too, or, we don’t have that in our country, what is it? And we end up doing a Google search and sharing screens because we’re from different cultures. It’s a micro culture event at the start of a business meeting, and you have to look for these opportunities and be intentional about them.

When we gather our team for a retreat, we go back through that list of things we know about people and build something fun around it. Say everybody’s answered what Marvel character they’d be, we could have costume elements on the first night, or personalize a gift bag around someone’s favorite candy or a little fidget toy. People get something like that and think, wow, they really do know me here. That’s what you’re going for.

So let’s recap how you create a company culture for a remote team. One, decide it and describe it. Two, make sure your core values support it. Three, create it, through language, by telling your people what you want it to be and asking if you’re succeeding, and through events, micro events and major events, that move toward the culture you want. Then, recognize it when it’s happening, and reward it, tell people, hey, good job, thanks for doing that.

Number four, you’re going to put someone in charge. This may not be you. I’m the visionary on our team, not the implementer. I love coming up with ideas, but if it was left up to me to implement them, it wouldn’t happen. So you need to put someone in charge. Starting out, that’s going to be you. You’ve got to systematize it for success, calendar time for it, maybe an hour a week, maybe two hours a month, a meeting between you as CEO and you as head of HR. Sit down and say, okay, here are three events I want to see happen this next month for our culture, here’s why, here’s what I want it to look like. Then take that and run with it. For a while that’s got to be you, but you’ll want to eventually put someone else in charge of it.

This episode is brought to you by EricDingler.com. If you scroll down, you’ll find the 11 Day Remote Team Leadership Reset, eleven days, eleven emails, eleven journaling prompts I use to reconsider my own leadership and fix mindsets that weren’t serving me well because I hadn’t shifted them from in-person team application to remote team application. I wrestled through these myself, pulled them together for some of my newer leaders, and decided to make it available to everyone. Whether you’re transitioning from in-person to remote, or becoming a leader for the first time of a remote team, go to EricDingler.com and scroll down to the 11 Day Remote Team Leadership Reset. I’ve set up a Linktree there too, so you’ll see some things about my digital marketing agency and some accessibility resources, but as a listener of this podcast, go straight to the 11 Day Remote Team Leadership Reset.

So here are six ideas, things we do or have done with our own team, to help create culture.

Number one, have a virtual break room. We use WhatsApp for this. Sometimes I’ll drop a QR code in there people can scan at a Starbucks for coffee, since if we had a physical office we’d have a coffee machine. We post announcements, ask random life questions, what are you doing this weekend, anybody got plans. Two of our team members recently went on maternity leave, and shortly after their babies were born they were posting pictures in our virtual break room, and we were all just as excited as their families would be. We’ll do picture scavenger hunts, photo contests, even a poem writing prompt. It’s a place to meet around topics and conversations and life, because we’re doing life together, half a world apart, continents apart, but trying to accomplish something together.

Number two, ask non-work related questions to start a meeting, some small talk. Eventually you get to know your team. We use the DISC profile with our team, and if somebody’s a high D, a driven, dominating personality, I don’t start with small talk with them, that’s actually me too, I like to cut to the chase. But some of my team really like small talk at the beginning, so we do it. It can’t be a checklist, though, it can’t be, I asked the question, now move on. And you have to be culturally sensitive here, especially if you’re hiring from Eastern Europe. People there don’t understand why Americans and the British open with, how are you doing, when nobody actually means it, it’s just habit, and if someone answers honestly instead of, good, fine, you don’t know what to say. It comes off as fake to them. So you’ve got to be mindful of the culture your team is coming from when you ask these questions.

Number three, staff parties, even remote. Zoom parties and events. I’ve done things like, first person back to the camera with a mixing spoon wins, and everybody goes running through their house. You’ve got to know your cultures here too, not every household has every item, so toilet paper, a mixing spoon, a plate, a cup, those are safe bets. Virtual escape rooms work. Computer games together, not everybody’s thing, so you don’t do it often. Watching a movie together as a team, or a concert, interacting and talking through it. A team night at the movies, even virtually, even if it’s two in the afternoon for part of your team.

Number four, photo scavenger hunts. We’ve done things where everybody gets a list, say twelve items, one a week, things out in the community, a playground, a street sign. Street signs look different everywhere, a stop sign doesn’t say stop in every country, since stop is English. People start to picture each other’s world. If you all worked in the same office, you’d naturally know, hey, have you been to the new place on Third Street. On a remote team you don’t even know what grocery store somebody shops at. These give you that.

Number five, a company offsite. Start saving for it now, the way you’d set aside money for office rent, and build up to it. We spent a week together in Istanbul, Turkey, and it was amazing. I was just talking to Peter on our team yesterday and he brought up that week, saying we need to do it again. Yes, they can be expensive, but you’re not maintaining an office. If you ever want help coordinating something like that, reach out, Marissa on our team is great at it.

So those are some of the things we do. I want to hear from you, what have you done or thought of since we’ve been talking through this today?

Before I get to this week’s leadership tip and travel update, thank you for listening this far. And after you start the 11 Day Leadership Reset over at EricDingler.com, I have a favor to ask. Would you review, subscribe, and share this podcast wherever you listen? It really does help the podcast get discovered and grow, and it’s encouraging to me to keep doing this.

All right, this week’s leadership tip. Culture is the reflection of your leadership. Culture is the reflection of your leadership. This is why you need to be so intentional with your leadership, because you can say whatever you want your culture to be, but it’s what you do that matters. Your leadership is intention and action. Leadership is always action based, so there’s always a result, and since there’s always a result, there’s always a reflection, and the reflection you see is your culture. This is why you have to be intentional to grow as a leader. You’ve got to take time, think about who you are, think about your leadership, think about the change you want to be. If you don’t grow, your business won’t grow. Your leadership is the capacity of your business. So decide about the culture you want to have, and ask yourself, is my leadership working toward that? Is my leadership going to create a reflection that is that culture?

Travel update. We’re still traveling full time, in a period of fast travel. I’m recording this in Austria, in a small Airbnb with a lot of construction outside, hopefully Adobe Podcast is filtering that noise out. We’re here for a week, then headed to Germany. Before Austria, we were in Budapest, and let me tell you, Budapest is somewhere I’ll go back to. The parliament building is beautiful, the food scene is incredible, we had the best, most authentic Peruvian food we’ve had since leaving Peru. The people are fantastic, and the public transportation is some of the best I’ve seen in Europe.

About that public transportation, you do have to be careful. We got caught out on our last full day there. We’d been there sixteen days, but you can only buy fifteen day transportation passes, and that’s what we’d bought. The system runs on an honor system there, you don’t tap in or out, and I’d only been asked for my ticket twice in fifteen days. On our sixteenth day, on a tram, someone checked our tickets and they’d expired. He was very kind about it, told us he wasn’t allowed to give a warning, but fined us for two adults instead of six, since our youngest travels on a free student pass and my mother-in-law travels free as a senior citizen. He walked us to an ATM to pay the fine in local currency, then to a machine to buy passes for our last 24 hours, since we were headed to Margaret Island, in the middle of the Danube, between the Buda and Pest sides of the city. They have a massive fountain synchronized to music and lights, and at 9pm they play their whole repertoire. We were there on the 4th of July, so it was our fireworks for the year.

Go to Budapest. Go to the Central Market, go to Margaret Island, ride the Metro 1 line, the oldest metro on the continent, with old tile and wood stations. Just watch your transportation pass expiration date.

All right, my friend, that’s it for this episode. Until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.