How To Build Community on a Remote Team

It’s a question we’ve gotten over and over again: How do we at Peak Support create community on a remote team? How do we ensure our team members feel connected to each other, to our company, and to the clients we serve?

Peak Support is a customer service outsourcing firm. We’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but we’re remote-first, which means we have team members all over the U.S. and the Philippines. As a result, we’ve built every process to run remotely, right from the beginning. It starts with sales and marketing, recruiting, hiring, and training. It continues as we operate high-performance customer service teams for our clients.

And underlying all of this is a community that thrives — not despite but because of the fact that everyone works remotely.

Because we’ve been remote since day 1, we knew that we had to be intentional about fostering community. And that intentionality is key.

In an office, people have many ways to build relationships. You might share an office with someone, or sit in the cubicle next door. You might meet someone at lunch or at the water cooler. In a remote world, there are fewer natural opportunities for serendipitous interactions — so you have to purposefully create them.

The good news — when you’re intentional, you can build an incredibly strong community, whether you’re remote or not. (Just check out our Facebook reviews if you want proof!)

There are four main pillars to building community. We’ll introduce each one and discuss specific tactics for fostering each one on a remote team.

Pillar #1 — Shared Vision and Values

Whether it’s a company, a football team, or a summer camp, a successful community is typically built on a shared vision or purpose. People want their work to have meaning; they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

This is more challenging in a remote world, because it’s easier for team members to be heads down, focused on their work, and ignoring the broader company around them. You have to work harder to fight against this isolation and make sure your whole team is aligned around your shared vision or goal.

At Peak Support, this starts in our interview process, where we discuss our core values. It continues in our New Hire Orientation, which is led by the CEO, Jonathan Steiman, who spends most of his time talking about our vision, mission and core values.

Jon also talks about how we created our vision, mission, and core values — and how we’ve edited them over time, with input from the entire team. A company, like any community, is a living organism, and it needs to grow and change. We’ve spent time re-articulating our mission and vision, and we may do so again. So Jon tells our new team members that they are now officially on the editing team.

We talk about our core values on a regular basis as well, in team meetings and huddles. They’ve all become hashtags — you’ll often see #ClientFirst or #ExtremeProfessional tossed around on our chat rooms, typically when a team or individual is getting a shoutout. And at the end of the year, 20% of each person’s evaluation is based on the core values as well.

We also talk publicly about Peak Support’s challenges, and our victories. The goal is to make every team member feel like they are a critical piece of our success — because they are. Most of our new clients come from referrals. So if we land a new client, it’s not just a credit to the person who closed the deal — it’s a credit to everyone who touched the referring account.

Pillar #2 — Mutual Trust and Respect

Trust is a bit of a rare commodity in the corporate world. Only 46% of employees place “a great deal of trust” in their employers … which is fewer than would trust a stranger, according to HR data analysts One Model.

Members of a community have to trust each other. Leaders need to trust that their team is acting with the company’s best interests in mind. Team members need to have the same belief in their leaders. Even if I can’t see you, I want to trust that you have my back.

At Peak Support, we aim to foster trust by establishing a culture of feedback and transparency. We actively seek, and respond to, feedback. We have some formal mechanisms for this, including an end of year survey, exit interviews, and an anonymous feedback form.

We take our end of year survey very seriously. We ask the same questions every year, and track our scores over time. The survey also has sections for people to write in any suggestions they have. We read and consider all of them.

Similarly, when a team member submits anonymous feedback, Jon will review it and send a response to the whole company. We don’t take every suggestion, of course, but we do take many. And if we don’t take a suggestion, we explain why.

We also do this informally. We reach out to individuals to gather feedback. And we prioritize relationship-building, so that those individuals feel comfortable coming to us. We aim to create a “virtual open door” so everyone feels comfortable reaching out to me, Jon, or another member of the leadership team, if they have questions or concerns.

A culture of appreciation is also critical. We take every opportunity to thank our team members for their work, whether it’s one-on-one or in an all-company huddle. We are nothing without our team members — all of them, not just the superstars. And we want to make sure they know it.

Pillar #3 — Interpersonal Relationships

Interpersonal relationships are key to creating community — and this may be the area where being remote creates the most challenges. When there is no water cooler, how can you create informal opportunities for people to meet and connect?

In truth, a core part of our strategy has always been … to meet in person. We’ve held regional meetups and an annual Summit that brought together the whole team. Those meetups create opportunities to build offline relationships, which then strengthen our online community. This year, unfortunately, that’s not an option.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t connect. One powerful tactic is our weekly huddle. Each week, the huddle is led by a different team lead, who chooses a topic and invites people to share. Our team members share incredibly powerful stories every week.

Here’s just one example, when the topic was “Who in your life would you like to thank?”

I come from a broken family and being in one of them sucks. Growing up, it was my aunt and Lolo (grandfather) who took care of us. They gave us everything they had without us realizing just how much of a sacrifice they were making. Long story short, my grandfather passed away 4 years ago. I regret that I never thanked him for doing what he did for all those years.

This is just one example — but people share stories like this all the time. We do the huddle entirely on chat, which is actually incredibly useful. It ensures more people can join. But it also actually enables more sharing and interaction. You might not stand up and share something like that at an in-person meeting, but maybe you’re more comfortable with it over chat.

And then your colleagues can add emojis, give you high fives or hearts, or add responses, which they simply wouldn’t be able to do if this was an in-person meeting of 200 people, or if it was a call.

But what about Zoom happy hours?

A key point here: Taking activities that worked offline, like happy hours and trivia nights, and putting them on Zoom, will only take you so far. You need to rethink relationship-building in a remote world, and create remote-first solutions like the huddle. Your brain works differently in a remote world, and relationships are built differently as well.

In particular — most relationship building happens in small groups or one-on-one, so a large Zoom happy hour won’t facilitate those connections. Our New Hire Orientation is one powerful opportunity to build relationships, as it enables Jon to connect with every new team member. We’ve been offering wellness programs, including fitness classes, yoga, and mindfulness. And Jon sometimes opens a Zoom channel and hosts virtual “open office hours” so anyone on shift can jump in and chat.

I did recently host a happy hour for our growing U.S. team. We had grown from 9 to 16 people in just a few weeks and I wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to meet. I knew a large group gathering wouldn’t work that well, so we took an ice-breaker from our Summit and adapted it. We went into breakout rooms. Each pair had 10 minutes to get to know each other and identify 2–3 things they had in common. Then they came back to the group and each person had to introduce each other.

It was great. It was a nice, 45-minute activity, and served its purpose. But when it comes to building community, it barely scratched the surface. There is much, much more to be done.

Pillar #4 — Clear Communication

When you’re remote, you don’t get to see everyone’s interactions, and you lose all physical communication, like sharing smiles in the hallways. It makes it that much more critical for leaders to be present and communicating in the way they want the rest of the company to emulate.

As many people have written recently, requiring video calls is table stakes for effective communication. *Everyone* needs to be on video, including the CEO and senior leadership! People on video are generally more engaged with the content, and they can see each other’s body language.

I recently found out a team member’s father had died, simply because I could tell on a video call that she’d been crying, and I followed up to ask if she was ok. I wouldn’t have known if I’d only heard her voice.

But the larger point is that leaders have to take extra care to make sure they are communicating frequently, proactively, and effectively. This is just as true remotely as it is in the physical world.

Recently, for example, we rolled out a big operational change, and I underestimated the confusion it would create. Because I had been planning it for months, and had confidence in the plan, it didn’t occur to me that I’d have to convince the team.

It took me a couple months to understand the level of resistance. I then used one of our weekly huddles to provide the whole company with detailed information about why we made the decision and why we thought it was the best route for the company.

These types of communications need to happen in multiple ways. In our leadership call. On the huddle. On Carrot.io, the tool we use for important company communications. On email. Different people consume information in different ways, so leaders need to be hyper-aware of this — particularly in a remote world, when the option of in-person physical communication is lost to us.

TL;DR

Building a community in any company — whether remote or not — is hard work. It requires intentionality and care. In fact, in many cases, being physically together may allow leaders to fool themselves into thinking their communities are stronger than they actually are.

Because we’ve been remote from day one, we’ve been forced to be very intentional about how we build community — and as a result, our community is stronger than most.

Use the four pillars and the tactics we’ve discovered to develop your own team’s remote culture, but don’t be fooled into thinking a couple tweaks here and there, a few happy hours and trivia nights, are a substitute for true community. True community takes hard work, and it is built every day, one interaction at a time.

Do you have your own tactics that we didn’t include above? Leave them in the comments below, or tweet us at @peak_support so we can share more ideas!