Can you build culture at a distance? Yep. Here’s how.
Culture at a distance
Let’s start with two assumptions:
You are a leader of a company or organization
You have an interest in crafting culture rather than being at its mercy
If both those things are true, what follows will give you the tools to build your culture from a distance. It’ll also help you work with a partner in that process.
The “from a distance” part has been big recently because of the pandemic, but we’ve been designing culture this way for much longer. Unless you have the luxury of having all your employees under one roof, it’s probably on your mind. If you operate in multiple states or countries, building culture from afar is unavoidable.
You can choose to shape your culture, or you can let it happen to you. Leaders usually prefer to drive.
Culture in early-stage companies
People aren’t always clear on what culture is or why it’s important, so let’s address that first. You have a strategy, and you have processes. You might even have them written down somewhere. Culture is what happens in the spaces between those things. Where there aren’t specific guides for what to do, people have default behaviors. That’s culture.
In most companies, there are a lot more spaces than there are guides or rules. When people say that culture eats strategy for breakfast, they’re talking about how much more pervasive culture is. Culture operates in the background, and it’s always on.
When you have people at multiple locations—especially when people’s homes are those places—culture shapes all kinds of behaviors that aren’t directly observable. Delivering to deadlines, following up with customers, being constructive in meetings—culture drives these more than strategy or process, and most of that happens outside of your awareness. You don’t see the “how”, only the outcomes.
You’re a leader, so here’s the leading part: If you aren’t clear about the “how” of the work, people will default to whatever is most expedient—the shortest path.
On the positive side, they’ll almost always behave at their level of character and personal discipline. On the negative side, whatever you tolerate will be a part of the culture. Most people want to do the right thing, but you have to create the conditions that make “the right thing” the best choice. If you tolerate gossip, it’s in the culture. If you tolerate missing deadlines, that’s in the culture too. Leave these things on the menu and someone’s going to order them.
That alone should lead you to be
thoughtful about hiring well, and
clear about your shared boundaries.
For most early-stage companies, leaders have little to no experience establishing those boundaries, and the problem of distance and virtual teamwork add a few complications. There’s a paradox here: It’s easier to build a solid culture from the start rather than fix problems in the culture later, but knowing how to do that comes with time and experience. It’s a conundrum.
The process I’m going to lay out here works great for just about any early-stage company. Leaders don’t need to know much new stuff to lead this process, though there are some nuances that I’ll point out at each step. This process works great in person, but it works (with the modifications I’ll mention) just as well using Zoom, phone, and basic collaboration tools. The process can take as little as two weeks, and the cost is negligible. You can build an intentional culture remotely, and you can do it sooner and better than you might think. This process is no substitute for experience and wisdom, but it will help you get there faster.
If you’re a leader wrestling with how to build culture remotely, start here.
(Quick note: I’m going to be talking about some tools and templates here. If you want examples, especially for surveys, interview questions, and session agendas, drop me a note. Happy to share.)
A lightweight, scalable process for building culture from a distance
As a general rule, when the thing you are building is complex, your approach should be simple. For building a culture in a fast-growing company—and across geographies, to boot—the steps are really straightforward:
Get a baseline of what your culture is
Create a shared definition of what it is going to be
Build the specifics of that intended culture into your normal work
There’s no need to reinvent tools and approaches here—it’s fundamentals that win the day.
Get a baseline of what your culture is
You already have a culture. It might not be written down, and you might not have the words to describe it, but your culture started with the first conversation you had with another person about working together. Every person you brought on added to that culture, and every day grew that culture a little more. Before you can really set about the work of building the future, it’s helpful—and often vital—to understand what your culture is today. Here’s how to do that:
Start with some detective work. Before you start conversations with anyone about the culture, search out everything you can that reflects your company. Look at any press you’ve gotten. Look at Glassdoor reviews. See what people say about you on LinkedIn and Twitter. Pull together anything you can from customers, employees, investors, and partners. In the strategic planning world, this is called an “environmental scan”. For your purposes, it’s just a reflection of what the external world sees in your company.
Look in the mirror. If you have a company, you’ve created a lot of stuff: strategic plans, business plans, employee onboarding stuff, policy docs, internal communications, investor updates, pitch decks, etc. Pull all this stuff together as well. How you made these reflects how you are.
Do your polling. What your people think, feel, and believe is decisive for what kind of culture you have. For an early-stage company, this means doing a survey to establish what the culture is and how it’s trending. For building culture at a distance, you can use tools like Google Forms or Typeform to do this for free or cheap.
Talk to people. Once you have the external perspective, the “inside the company” tone, and some sense from the surveys about how your people see the company, it’s time to go a little deeper. Interviews with a cross-section of employees (or all of them if you can manage it) gives you the opportunity to dig in and get clarity and context on what you’ve heard. Zoom or phone work fine for this.
Make your “big board”. Every war room and detective’s office has a “big board”: that one place where everything is assembled so you can see all of it and find the themes and connections. For establishing the baseline of your culture, you’re looking for a composite of external info, internal tone, themes from the survey, and texture from the interviews to establish a comprehensive qualitative picture of what your culture is. This should reveal strengths, trouble spots, and quirks. There are plenty of free or cheap tools for putting this all together—everything from Miro to Google Docs. The main job here is to sort out the major themes and areas for attention.
One big caveat: if you suspect there are trust issues in your company, running this process yourself may create new problems. If your people suspect you’re on a fishing expedition—or a witch hunt—the best case is that they don’t give you the complete truth. The worst case is that they lie or don’t give you any information at all. Don’t pretend the problem isn’t there—lean into external validation.
There are two easy ways to get some neutrality into the process: work with a partner, and work with instruments that have broad industry acceptance. Working with a partner is obvious: people are more likely to give the unvarnished truth to someone they see as objective. Using standard tools has the same objectivity effect. There are a number of great instruments out there that should do the trick.
Once you have that baseline in place—your “as is”—it’s time to create alignment toward what you want to build: your “to-be”.
Create a shared definition of what your culture is going to be
Here’s the point where you might lose a little steam: that first piece can be kind of hard. It’s a bit of work to pull it all together, and it can be tough to confront some of what you learn. It’s totally worth it—essential, even—but it takes a strong leader to be able to confront what is.
As you transition from establishing the current state to defining the future state, you’re going to want to be fearless and honest in owning the things that you have allowed as a leader. There’s no shame in having been less than perfect—we all have room for growth—but there certainly is a lot to lose in downplaying anything that really needs attention.
Remember: this is how people will choose to behave when they don’t have a guide. You have to be rigorously honest here.
This middle step is built around one session of a day or less. Companies have typically done these as an in-person all-hands, but this works very well via a well-facilitated Zoom session:
Show the receipts. Remember all that work you did to establish a baseline for your culture? This is where it pays off. Take everything you’ve learned and pull it all into a presentation. Include the survey results—graphs work particularly well here—as well as selected comments from your interviews, themes across everything you have collected, and any unanswered questions or contradictions in the data. Use this presentation to spotlight both the strongest themes and anything that provoked an “a-ha”.
Hold up the mirror. Schedule a session to reflect on what you have learned and create the culture you want. This typically includes some pre-work or pre-reading, a few words from the CEO about the vision, and perhaps an activity to establish the tone for the day. Present the deck from the previous step with plenty of room for questions and reflections, either in smaller group activities or in large group discussion. This establishes a common view and understanding about what’s in the current culture.
Design the future together. In the rest of the all-hands session, build on the previous exercise to establish the values supporting the vision from the introduction, prioritize those values for success in the daily work of the company, and give 3-5 behaviors that would demonstrate each value. It’s often helpful to end this session with a storytelling exercise that describes the culture in context of the success of the company. End with practical steps to embed these behaviors in daily and weekly work.
The imperative of this step is participation. People support what they help to create. When people can see who they are as a collective and participate in the design of who they want to be as a whole, they’re far more likely to behave in ways that reflect that design. In this sense, vision and culture are inextricably linked.
I used to think it was necessary to have everyone in the same room for this. I was wrong. Facilitated well, this session can work even better on Zoom than it does in person. At one session I led earlier this year, the feedback was that the Zoom session was better than their last offsite, and that last offsite had been a blast.
The main point here is to begin with the end in mind. If the session is designed well—that is, to drive toward the outcomes you want—format matters a lot less than you think. Consistency of intent is far more important than how you execute against that intent.
Curiosity, courage, collaboration are key here. If you’ve leaned into those at this point, you have a guide to how to build a company that excels even when you’re not around. Now it’s time to put that plan into action.
Build the specifics of that intended culture into your normal work
Culture isn’t an offsite—it’s a daily discipline. Teams are in the business of designing themselves, and this is how they do that each day. If your culture isn’t reflected in your normal processes and meetings, nothing’s happening there (same for strategy and OKRs, by the way).
The purpose of the culture design process isn’t to create a document, and it isn’t to make people feel good. You’ll get both of those things, but the purpose is to craft a culture that shapes behavior when people are making their own decisions. You can’t mandate behaviors, but you can set examples and intentions, and that goes a long way.
Many companies fail to follow through on implementing what they learn and create, and that’s a tremendous waste. Lack of follow-through in this process squanders the time and money spent surveying and interviewing people, getting them together, and creating plans and aspirations, and it fosters cynicism. Why would anyone put any time and energy into something like that again if you’re not going to do anything with it?
Still worse, it makes no sense to do all that work only to shelve it. Company performance depends upon a culture of performance, and you do that by making your culture a part of your work, not something outside of the work.
Start that practice by doing this:
Meet with intent. Much of the work of an early-stage company happens in meetings, and that’s your best opportunity for building the culture you want. Kick off meetings with company values, and close with a quick check-in on how well the team worked from those values. This takes about five minutes total, and the payoff in productivity is immediate.
Hire with clarity. When people hire for culture fit, they rarely say what that means, leading to sort of a “gut feel” decision. If you’re truly hiring for culture fit, ask questions that surface behaviors that indicate alignment with your company’s values. Write job descriptions that mirror those values. Create incentives for people to refer people they know who reflect those values. Caution: don’t hire for homogeneity—look for diverse expressions of your values.
Make decisions with integrity. If your values express who you want to be as a company, your decisions should reflect that. When you have a decision, especially one that is decisive about the product or its market, factor your values into the equation. If they’re clear, relevant, and specific, they should make decisions clearer.
There are lots of other ways to make your culture doc a living thing—everything from external communications to marketing to feedback to employee onboarding—but the main thing is to keep the discussion alive. That’s what takes culture from a lofty aspiration to a clear performance advantage.
Strong, intentional culture—everywhere
Culture isn’t soft, vague, or ambiguous. It isn’t something to pass off to HR or a “people person”, and it isn’t a nice to have. Culture is tangible. It can be assessed and managed. And it can slow your growth or fuel it.
I’ll address the business case for culture–it’s a strong one–in a future post. For now, it’s enough to know that employee turnover, customer churn, and slow growth are costly outcomes of an under-optimized culture. Accelerating growth and flawless execution are more likely in a strong one.
You can build and grow a performance culture from anywhere so long as you have clear intent, curiosity, and a little bit of courage. The basic framework here should accommodate many variations and just about any tools that suit your purpose. The culture process that produced results better than an in-person offsite was delivered via Google Docs, Google Forms, and Zoom. The process couldn’t have been simpler, nor the results more profound.
It’s easy to complain about the limits of distance work, but that’s a distraction. Most of the major tech companies have implemented distance work as the norm for the coming year. Microsoft has announced that employees can work from home permanently. Facebook has been offering employees incentives to move away from the Bay Area under the assumption that remote work will be the norm. For knowledge work, this is how we’re going to do it for some time to come, and maybe as a new way of working.
One last note: you’re already building culture whether you realize it or not. The habits, assumptions, and default behaviors you have today drive your company’s performance and how much work you have to devote to that performance. Your opportunity here is to design the culture rather than fighting against it.
Culture is about intent. Get that right, and you can build it anywhere.
This is the first in a planned series of DIY guides. I help companies with things like building culture, implementing OKRs, and driving change, but there are a lot of things early-stage companies can do on their own. If you need a hand or just want to talk through what you’re trying to do (beyond, you know, developing a product, getting customers, lining up funding), drop me a note and let’s chat. My goal is that more great companies grow faster.
