How To Build Culture On A Remote Team

Talent flows from teams.

We’ve known for over a decade that individual performance is hugely dependent upon the team that individuals are placed on. Top performance by individuals hinges on whether or not their teammates, their manager, and the organization they are a part of gives them the support, and the resources they need to do their best work.

So, it’s worth asking, “what it is that makes those teams so great?” And especially in the world we live in now-where a majority of those teams are actually working remotely-it’s worth asking what makes for a great team culture in and around remote teams? What are the elements that help a virtual and remote team thrive, that other underperforming teams lack.

The single best study on a great remote team culture was conducted a couple of years ago before all of the madness and the forced work-from-home experiment that many of us had to partake in started. It was conducted on virtual teams from multinational organizations that were also cross-functional teams. These were the most boundaryless of the boundaryless teams meeting virtually, most on video calls and collaborating asynchronously, because they were all over the world. And despite the distance, the biggest difference between the teams that thrived and the ones that failed to perform was the team’s culture.