It’s no wonder — the work environment you create for your employees has a huge impact on their well-being, productivity, and success. At my company, we take work-life balance and trust for our team very seriously, and we allow our team to flex their schedules. We use an instant messaging tool for quick communication, but from the beginning, we set a standard that employees should not feel that they need to answer immediately. As an example, even when I feel the urge, I resist answering my instant messages immediately if I’m offline or in the middle of working on something else. But this is much simpler to achieve in an office, where you can let your new hire explore and discover the company culture on their own.

The company offers generous benefits like a stipend for home office setup and encourages employees to take “disconnect” time to recharge. Employees no longer gauge job satisfaction solely by their salaries; they seek an environment that fosters growth, connectivity, and purpose. As the world moves towards an increasingly remote workforce, cultivating a thriving remote work culture has emerged as a strategic imperative. Use solutions like Slack to bring instant messaging to your teams and break down communication silos.

TrackingTime for Remote Time Tracking

The advantages of remote work culture for employees usually revolve around having a more lax schedule, ultimately meaning a better work-life balance. Establishing clear expectations is key to a harmonious remote work culture. The structure of remote work may be less organic than that of a physical workplace.

This helps build deeper relationships and replicates the opportunities for personal connection that you get in a physical office. Clearly document and communicate these company values and dedicate a few minutes to reiterating them during team-wide calls. This serves as a refresher for existing employees and helps your new hires get the hang of things faster.

Project Management Tools

Feedback should be more nuanced than negative and positive; it should be constructive. When all these elements are optimized, you can guarantee success in meeting project goals. While at one point only a work from home experience few could afford the privilege of remote work, in 2018, 70% of people globally worked from home at least once per week. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, you can expect that this number has only skyrocketed.

It’s important to communicate higher-level decisions with your team to build good relationships with them as it will help them feel like they are in fact, part of the team. It’s also important to let your employees know that you trust them and the work they do even though they are working remotely. When managing your remote workers, you will want to focus more on output rather than what they are doing hour by hour.