The Ultimate Guide to Maintaining & Strengthening Brand Culture through Remote Work
With all the disruption of the Coronavirus we wanted to offer our tips for building and strengthening team culture even while working remotely.
At Crooked Monkey, we have been at this remote work thing for quite some time. In fact, we’ve always been a remote-based company. Our employees are located all over the world. Meaning we have years of trial and error experience in learning how to build a successful culture remotely.
If you ask our team members what they love most about Crooked Monkey everyone says: The Mission and the Team. So fear not. Building great culture is possible (and maybe even better) when you’re remote. You just have to be super intentional and think remote-first, since it’s a wholly different mindset. We believe that culture, communication and efficiency are all much better with remote workers.
Remote Work - The Pros
With today’s environment, if you’re new to working remote, you probably didn’t have much of a choice. BUT, we still want to highlight some of the more nuanced advantages so you can think intentionally about how to make this a value-add for the office.
First, the obvious: Aside from saving the expense of having a large office space, it has allowed our employees to save time commuting. Less time in the car means less time in traffic, which means less stress, and more time at the gym, or doing whatever else you love. Your employees gain back at least 45 minutes both ways. That’s an hour and a half each day.
The less obvious, but even more substantial, benefits include: It has helped shape a more transparent and flat form of communication between our team. From day one we have worked to build more thorough processes and communications systems that encourage transparent communication. Since we can’t rely on running into each other for random conversations or knowledge sharing, our systems are more clear and concise. It has made training new employees much easier. Also, less stuff gets lost in translation. Most of our communication is written, so it’s easy to record and CC people when necessary.
How to Build and Strengthen your Brand Culture through Remote Work
Rituals
Rituals are the key to building culture, and just because you’re working remote doesn’t mean you should check your rituals at the door! Our team has daily rituals, random rituals, and monthly ones. A few of our favorites are checking in on Slack to start each day, birthday celebrations, and show-and-tell through Google photos. Below are a bunch more.. While reading, ask yourself what you can re-create from your office experience and what new rituals you’ll need to supplement the remote-experience!
Yes, we are a merchandise company and we really do think it is an important aspect of building your brand’s culture. The feeling of opening a gift box from your coworkers feels even more personal when your sitting at home.
More than that, branded gear gives everyone a common uniform or way to connect with each other beyond the work they do. It’s a treat to see someone rocking their gear in Google Hangouts and swag is an awesome opportunity for social media shout outs sharing when someone from the team wears original gear or something brand new.
Annual Summits
Although this one won’t apply to most who are temporarily transitioning, it is something we have found a lot of value in. At Crooked Monkey, we make a point to meet in person 3-4 times a year with big plans to brainstorm and improve the company in a “big picture” sense. They have given us the chance to better value those face to face meet ups and we really look forward to opportunity to mingle!
Forget The Agenda
Sometimes it important to drop the agendas and take the time just to catch up with your team. At Crooked Monkey, it isn’t uncommon for us to do a 30 minute hangout here and there just to chat about what’s going on in everyone’s lives. Knowing about the lives of your team and talking together about what is going on in the world can go a long way in promoting team work and unity. Give this one a shot during your time of working remotely to continue on with the everyday conversations you usually share in the office with your coworkers.
White-boarding Sessions
Our team thinks best around a whiteboard, even if we’re miles apart. So we bring a laptop into a conference room, set it down in the middle of the room, and get to work on the whiteboard. Our creative juices flow much better when we’re standing or walking around while still talking to another team member. It sounds a bit silly, but it has worked really well for us. Don’t let remote work stop you and your team from getting creative!
Coffee Breaks
You gotta get out of the house! So we instituted mandatory coffee breaks. With the coronavirus, take precautions, or maybe just go for a walk. Regardless, it’s important to get out and get moving. We suggest giving a “walking meeting” a try with another co-worker! Grab your headphones, schedule a call, and hit the pavement. Watch and see what a bit of fresh air can do for you!
Tools for Mastering Remote Work
Slack or Microsoft Teams
At Crooked Monkey, we have chosen to encourage most of our communication through Slack. Each morning, we greet one another a good morning and catch up on whats new. It sounds simple, but this has encouraged unity among our team and offers our employees the opportunity to chit chat as they would in your average office setting first thing in the morning. We encourage this communication to continue throughout the day when individual or team success is achieved because it gives us the chance to both congratulate and encourage one another!
Asana
Asana is a task management app and that allows our team to track and manage our current projects. Asana gives us the opportunity to create multiple work spaces that divide and organize projects for the appropriate team members to access and manage. In our experience, Asana assists in assuring that team members more clearly understand their responsibilities, are held accountable for deadlines, and can better achieve their company goals.
Google Hangouts
If you are a company where face to face contact is necessary for achieving your goals- you need to make use of Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts is a group messaging system that allows users to access group video chats (right from gmail). At Crooked Monkey, we make use of Google Hangout daily to promote brainstorming session, discussions of current projects, and as a replacement for your everyday conference room meetings.
GSuite
GSuite gives users the opportunity to connect, create, and access the work and ideas of their fellow teammates both quickly and easily. Chances are, you have already been using GSuite for quite some time to achieve your company goals, but are you using it to its full potential? At Crooked Monkey, we do lots of communication automation with the help of GSuite through keyword filters in our email to promote knowledge management. This keeps our employees inboxes from being cluttered, but also allows our team the chance to spread knowledge completely to everyone in the company. This is a fairly complicated idea that isn’t necessary for everyone, but if you think your company could hire remote worker in the future stay tuned, because an in depth blog is coming soon!
Custom Wellness Kits for your Remote Team
Although its true that swag is an important aspect in building your brands culture, whats even more important is the unity it brings to a team- especially those who work remotely. At Crooked Monkey, we have put together three kits that we hope will aide in your employees office transition and turn working from home, into a virtual bonding experience.
The three pre-organized kits are the Morning Refresh, the Wellness and the Work-leisure, each of which are filled with one custom apparel item and two custom Crooked Monkey promo items.
Don’t like what you see? Contact us today, and lets get started working together to build a box custom to you and your team. Regardless of the content you choose, our goal for these kits is to make videoconferencing more fun, the home work place more comfortable, and to take the stress out of being all cooped up!
It’s simple, you make the choice of what goes inside, and we do the rest! From sourcing, to packaging, to delivery straight to the homes of your employees- we do all fulfillment and logistics!
