We are a team of about 15 people. Most of us work from our Chicago office in Wicker Park, but a handful of teammates are fully remote. That split has taught us a lot about what it takes to build culture when not everyone is in the same room.
This is not a listicle of remote work tips. It is an honest look at what we have found actually works, what does not, and what we are still figuring out.
Culture is not about location
The biggest misconception about remote culture is that it requires replacing in-person experiences with digital equivalents. Virtual happy hours, online game nights, mandatory fun on Zoom. Most of these feel forced because they are forced.
Culture is not the activities. It is the way people treat each other, how decisions get made, what gets rewarded, and how information flows. Those things can be strong or weak regardless of where people sit.
Rituals that scale across distance
The rituals that work for distributed teams tend to be lightweight and asynchronous. Here is what has stuck for us:
- Monday kickoffs. A shared doc where every team posts their three priorities for the week. Takes five minutes to write, ten minutes to read across the company. Everyone knows what everyone else is focused on.
- Friday wins. A Slack thread where people share one thing that went well that week. No requirement for it to be work-related. Someone shipped a feature, someone finished a half-marathon, someone baked bread. It all counts.
- Quarterly in-person gatherings. We bring the full team together four times a year for two days. These are not strategy offsites. They are relationship-building time. Dinners, walks, working side by side. The in-person time makes the remote time work better.
Recognition fills the gap
In an office, recognition happens naturally. You see someone working late, you say thanks. You notice a win, you mention it in passing. Remote teams lose those spontaneous moments.
Structured recognition fills that gap. Not in a performative way, but in a consistent one. When a teammate in Berlin gets a beautifully packaged gift on their work anniversary, it communicates something that a Slack message cannot. Physical presence matters, and a tangible gift is a form of presence.
We use our own platform for this (naturally), and the response from our remote teammates is consistently stronger than from the in-office folks. That makes sense. The people who most need to feel connected are the ones who benefit most from tangible gestures.
Communication defaults matter more than tools
Every distributed team talks about tools. Slack versus Teams, Notion versus Confluence, Zoom versus Google Meet. The tools matter less than the defaults.
- Default to writing. If a decision was made in a meeting, it did not happen until it is written down somewhere everyone can find.
- Default to public channels. DMs are for personal conversations. Work conversations belong in shared channels where anyone can catch up.
- Default to async. Not every question needs an immediate response. Most do not. Setting that expectation reduces interruptions and respects different time zones.
The hard truth about hybrid
Hybrid is harder than fully remote. When most of the team is in one office and a few are remote, the remote people often become second-class participants. They miss the hallway conversations. They join meetings where half the room is on one camera and the audio is terrible.
The fix is not technology. It is behavior. If you have remote teammates, everyone should join the meeting from their own laptop, even if they are in the office. Important discussions should happen in writing, not after someone bumps into someone in the kitchen. These are small changes, but they signal that remote participation is not an afterthought.
What we are still working on
We have not figured it all out. Career development for remote employees is harder when their manager is in-office. Onboarding remotely still feels like it takes longer to build trust. And there are days when the office crew has a spontaneous lunch that the remote team misses, and that is a real inequity.
The companies that build strong distributed cultures are the ones that acknowledge these challenges honestly and keep iterating. There is no playbook that solves it permanently. Just a commitment to paying attention.