Remote Teams and Company Culture
By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner
Last week, we shared our views on the office of the future. As highlighted, one of the big concerns leaders have is how to create and maintain a dynamic and positive company culture if people are mostly working from home and/or at client locations. Even before the pandemic, there was a trend for people to work from home part of the time and companies to find talented people wherever they reside. Nowadays, most teams don’t reside in one office. They’re composed of members who are in different offices, client locations or at home offices.
At BroadSoft, we had a team of 2,000 people in 23 offices with about 25% working from home offices. Our corporate headquarters was our fourth largest office, with most of our senior leadership working in different offices or in home offices. Most if not all of our sales and customer facing teams worked from their home offices. Over our 20 years, we did 25 acquisitions, where we brought in teams from different countries with many different cultures.
Early on, we embraced our remoteness. We figured that in order to succeed in the global economy, we needed to find the best people, regardless of where they live. Maintaining and growing our company culture across different countries and time zones was not easy. It certainly would have been much easier if everyone was in one location, but if we would have tried to force that, BroadSoft would have probably just been a footnote in VoIP history.
So, how do you grow and maintain your company culture with remote teams? Most importantly, you need to acknowledge that it’s important, that it’s hard and that you need to put energy and time into it. That’s something our executive team did early on, and was one of the keys to our success. Here’s some things we did to ensure a strong company culture.
Have regular town hall discussions - Every month, we would do an all hands meeting. We’d provide our latest achievements, celebrate our successes, indicate what to expect moving forward and emphasize our values and mission. A few things you can do to make sure town halls are successful. First, prepare for them like you would for a customer or investor meeting. Your team is smart and will know if you just wing it. Second, meet your team in their business hours, not yours. We would have multiple sessions to accommodate our teams in Europe and Asia. And lastly, record the sessions and provide the ability for your team to provide feedback and suggestions. They want to be heard.
Get together with your team face-to-face - Every quarter, I would get my leadership team together for a few days to review progress, refine our strategy and agree on course corrections. This was immensely helpful in ensuring that the team was aligned and executed efficiently and effectively. Most importantly, we would allocate time to do team building and have fun. This built trust within the team, and was key to a highly motivated and effective team. Periodically, we would invite a larger audience of key contributors to participate. This was a great way of spreading and reinforcing our culture, from the top down.
Make yourself available - Don’t sit in your ivory tower, reach out to your team and see how things are going and get feedback. As I traveled around the world, I would always try and make time to visit our teams and check in. Sometimes, it was just taking them out for lunch or dinner. I’d provide a quick update (kind of a mini town hall) and ask for feedback on what we could do better. This always made the teams feel good about what we were doing, and provided me with suggestions on how we could improve.
So, remote teams are normal, and the collaboration technology we have today is amazing. It allows people to work on their terms from anywhere at any time with incredible tools. But, the remoteness does make it harder for people to feel connected to your company culture. Make it a priority and you can make your team more effective. Hopefully, our tips provide you some ideas on how you can do this. Let us know if you have other suggestions or ideas.
