Most companies are taking advantage of the benefits of working remotely, but few are building great remote cultures.

Here are 10 things I've seen great companies do to build best in class remote cultures:
👍Great remote companies pair employees up with onboarding buddies. This buddy helps demystify the organization and process for new hires.

👎Bad remote companies give employees an onboarding document and force them to fend for themselves.
👍Great remote companies encourage new team members to make quick video intros to send to new hires

👎Bad remote companies don’t facilitate team member introductions and leave the new hire in the dark

Here’s an intro one of our team members made using @VowelHQ Image
👍Great remote companies introduce new hires at the all hands meetings and get different teams involved

👎Bad remote companies don’t introduce the new hires at the all hands and just focus 100% on business, 0% on fun
Here’s our flexible template for your next all hands meeting: vowel.com/meeting-agenda…
👍Great remote companies arrange team offsites and bring the team together in-person for team bonding and collaborative building (at least 2x per year!)

👎Bad remote companies don’t think offsites are worth the expense and never get the team together in person
👍 Great remote companies hold quarterly hackathons + inspire amazing work. Get creative and plan your next hackathon – perhaps at your next company offsite!

👎Bad remote companies stick to the engineering tickets + product docs and never get creative with how the work gets done
👍Great remote companies invest in team-building activities – budgets for team lunches, virtual team events, and continued learning opportunities

👎Bad remote companies keep everyone siloed in their own work and encourage a clock in/clock out culture
👍Great remote companies facilitate cross-functional connections. They use apps like Donut on Slack or create random 1-1s each month to build cross-functional relationships

👎Bad remote companies never encourage or inspire cross functional teams to work together.
👍Great remote companies create non-work related Slack channels. The best ones go well beyond #random and #parents and get very specific with channels like #wordnerds, #productreccos and #bookclub

👎Bad companies never encourage their team to bring personal interests to work
👍Great remote companies make it okay to skip non-crucial meetings. They encourage skipping + they record meetings to share after (using @VowelHQ!)

👎Bad remote companies hold too many meetings and invite too many people to each one
👍Great remote companies share the wins – whether it’s a Slack #shoutouts channel (HIGHLY recommended) or sending out “win” emails when things go very right

👎Bad remote companies ship and move on without building recognition into the culture
What'd I miss? Add it below in the replies!

Follow me for more tips on building a remote first company – I’m doing it now with a team of 30 @VowelHQ

And don’t forget to like/retweet the first tweet below if you found this helpful:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Andy Berman • vowel.com

Andy Berman • vowel.com Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @berman66

Jun 7
Remote work is not just young, privileged tech workers.

Here are the real faces that benefit from the remote work revolution:
1/ Parents of young children

The pandemic made life extremely hard for parents – especially working women who quit when schools and child care became unreliable.

Remote work enables parents to move closer to their support systems while not giving up career growth
2/ Single parents

For single parents, in-person work was always a challenge. Trying to coordinate drop off and pick up times, after hours childcare, and a routine that doesn’t operate on a 9-5.

Remote work means a more flexible schedule with no commutes and more money saving
Read 10 tweets
May 24
We just hooked the @VowelHQ team up with Opal Cameras.

TLDR: kicks ass! (This is coming from someone who started a camera company, Nanit.)

Time for a product review v.s. my $3k Sony A7C setup ImageImage
Let’s start with the design
- Beautiful, sleek design
- Looks great on top of my monitor
- Feels stable

In a nutshell, looks extremely professional and complements my home office well ImageImage
Construction and materials

Generally feels super high quality. It’s heavy, the USB cable is thick, and it doesn’t feel cheap. I also love the magnetic camera lens cover – great touch – but has a tendency to get lost. Wish I could snap it to the side of the camera when it’s off Image
Read 9 tweets
May 17
Throughout my career I’ve held and been in thousands of meetings. Most are bad, some are great, very few are excellent.

Here’s 6 things you’re probably doing wrong in your remote meetings and how you can consistently have excellent meetings:
1/ You always have your camera off!

No one wants to stare at a black box. If you host a virtual meeting and go cameras off, your team will lose track of the convo because you literally can’t. stay. awake.

Video on or phone call

media.giphy.com/media/C25OqSUQ…
1/A There is a time and place for camera off meetings. It's to help the team recharge. The majority of meeting are not that!
Read 10 tweets
Apr 26
A guide to leveling up with remote work, a thread 🧵
Last week, I tweeted about the challenges of remote work, one being career advancement.

With remote work, you have less time with senior leaders, less visibility due to async comms, and limited in-person team building.
But remote work can be a great opportunity to do your best work. Here’s what I tell our growing team at @VowelHQ about what it takes to level up in a remote-first culture.
Read 11 tweets
Apr 19
Last week I tweeted about in-person work being dead – and it is.

With remote teams, you get to hire the best people across the world, eliminate commutes, and build/operate 24/7. It’s 💯 the future.

But it’s also really hard – here's all the challenges remote teams will face:
1/ Career development

Remote teams are going to struggle with leveling up junior employees who don’t get access to the same learning experiences in-person provides. Because of this they’ll lose at hiring v.s. in-person teams.

Expect to hire senior folks & invest in development
2/ Recruiting

Even though you can hire from anywhere 🌎, recruiting is going to be hyper-competitive. The same candidates get access to 10x the number of companies which means 10x more interviews and 10x the competition.

Don’t expect hiring to get easier
Read 12 tweets
Apr 18
A lot of folks are tweeting about poison pills, @elonmusk and how terrrible the twitter board is, but what I want to know is what is Silver Lake and @egon_durban doing?
Egon (Co-CEO of Silver Lake) is already on the board. They own $1b of stock at roughly $34 and more at $44, and in the biggest bull market for tech they’ve made a nothing return.

techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/twi…
They can’t be happy with twitter’s performance or their investment?

So why aren’t they involved here?
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(