🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

How consistently does your team’s behavior reflect the team’s values, no matter where they work?

💡 Concept

Maintaining company culture is a top concern for companies that shift to remote or hybrid work. Yet culture is not tied to place—culture is a common identity that reflects shared values and beliefs.

Beyond identifying your mission and values, building and maintaining a positive culture in a distributed environment requires leaders to set clear expectations about the following:

• Behaviors: What behaviors show commitment to the team’s values? What kinds of behaviors are unacceptable? Are there different expectations for working virtually versus in-office?

• Attitudes: What traits and attitudes do you expect from your team?

• Rituals: What daily, weekly, monthly, or other regular rituals do you practice that reinforce culture? Are these accessible to remote and co-located team members?

• Language: What style, vocabulary, and phrases best reflect your values?

• Feedback: How can team members provide feedback on situations that impact culture? 

Your company’s culture should reflect the following:

• Alignment: The items listed in the previous section should be compatible with one another, as well as with your mission and values.

• Transparency: Team members should be able to see their company’s values reflected in the behaviors, actions, words, and rituals of their teams, whether they work remotely or in the office.

• Consistency: Team members should not experience different cultures if they work from home rather than in the office.

🎬 Take Action

Reflect on your team’s current culture to identify immediate areas for improvement, then choose one action that can help improve your team’s culture. Here are some recommendations:

• Add an async ice breaker question to your team’s Slack channel that reflects one of your values.

• Create a Culture Canvas, explicitly outlining expectations for behavior, attitudes, language, and rituals.

• Give your team the opportunity to provide anonymous feedback on your team’s current culture, such as their assessment of your culture’s alignment, transparency, and consistency.

• Evaluate your to-do list or calendar for items that help build culture, like establishing psychological safety and providing direct feedback.

• Evaluate your language for alignment with values by proofreading and editing any written messages and thoughtfully considering spoken words.

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Learn more about how to align your team’s virtual culture in Goplaceless.

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.