10 tips to build and sustain 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.