What is the best way to maximise productivity, belonging and accountability in a remote workplace? Building a strong company culture that can withstand physical distance, time zone differences and a lack of in-person team building.
The latest data from workplace research experts Gallup finds that employee disconnection is on the rise. When asked about their average working day, 20% of employees reported that they felt lonely “a lot of the previous day”. But among remote workers, that number rose to 25%. If 1 in 4 remote workers are dealing with loneliness, how does that affect company culture?
The answer: employee engagement is falling.
Despite global trends, there is an alternative to employee isolation in hybrid and remote workplaces. While face-to-face interactions will always be the gold standard for human connection, simply demanding that employees return to the office may be seen as cruel or out of touch. As more parents remain in the workforce, flexible working has become a non-negotiable for many. So how do we ensure that remote workers feel connected, empowered and productive?
As a fully remote company, the team at Mo understand the benefits and challenges of operating a distributed team in a competitive market. Balancing business needs with employee expectations is made harder by a-synchronous communication. But that doesn’t mean that endless meetings are the answer.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the common challenges that hybrid and remote workplaces face. Once we understand the scope of the problem, we can address tangible solutions to improve your company culture even when your team doesn’t share an office (or even a time zone). Hint: the answer isn’t a return-to-office mandate.
Evidence Shows That Hybrid and Remote Work is Here to Stay
How has remote work changed over the last decade? Here’s a basic timeline:
2015: Approximately 7% of the global workforce engaged in remote work (Statista).
2020: COVID-19 caused a surge in remote work. Over 70% of employees worked remotely at the peak of the pandemic (Gallup).
2023: Remote work stabilised with about 28% of the global workforce working remotely (Velocity Global).
2025: Projections indicate that 32.6 million Americans (approximately 22% of the U.S. workforce) will be working remotely (Forbes).
How does that compare with the UK? According to The Times, the UK leads as the work-from-home capital of Europe. 58% of British remote workers claimed that they’d consider leaving their jobs if they were asked to return to the office. Is this a problem for overall company culture? Despite the gloomy headlines, the right interventions can transform remote and hybrid work from an obstacle to success to the secret ingredient. Let’s unpack the differences.
Benefits of Hybrid and Remote Work
- Encourages parents to remain in work by allowing flexible hours
- Builds a geographically diverse workforce
- Allows candidates to apply who may otherwise be excluded due to cost of living in large cities
- Supports employees with chronic illness or disabilities
- Reduces time spent commuting and pollution from travel
Challenges of Hybrid and Remote Work
- Employees are more likely to feel isolated
- Some complain of a lack of innovation or ideation
- Possible dilution of company values
- Creates fragmented communication patterns
- Reduces opportunities for career growth, promotion and mentorship
Why is Returning to the Office Not The Right Solution?
While some high profile business owners and pundits have called for workers to return to the office, this sort of sweeping mandate risks rolling back the considerable benefits of remote and hybrid working, including better access and flexibility for working parents. Is there another way to improve engagement and productivity without forcing employees back into the office?
Yes. It’s all about prioritising a positive company culture to ensure that remote work doesn’t get in the way of business success.
Culture is About More Than Proximity
Rather than focusing on what we lose from remote work, it’s essential to remember what we gain and amplify it. For example, although a team may lose proximity without an office, they gain diversity and flexibility.
In theory, remote work should bring a greater sense of happiness as it eliminates long commute times. So, why are remote workers lonelier? To make remote work really work, HR leaders must focus on reducing employee isolation and emphasising alignment, collaboration and connectedness.
It’s time to rework HR strategies and usher in innovative ways to engage employees and embrace remote work. Employee belonging requires adaptation. Rather than simply sticking our heads in the sand and saying “things were easier before the pandemic!” So, where do we start?
A strong company culture requires these six pillars:
- Feelings of Belonging
- Psychological Safety
- Healthy Communication
- Development Opportunities
- A Shared Goal
- Meaningful Rewards
All of these things can be accomplished in a single HR strategy, but there must be commitment at every level of the business. If leadership is complaining about the shift to hybrid or remote work but employees are resisting returning to the office, alignment must be found before any company culture can move forward in a positive direction.
Workplace Trust Is a Two-way Street
If leadership and the larger workforce aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the issue of remote work, consider a compromise. For example, ambitious business targets could be incentivised in other ways, such as through a bonus or extra paid time off.
For company culture to thrive, leaders must move away from threatening punitive action (which is how many remote workers see a return-to-office mandate) and pivot to meaningful recognition and encouragement.
It’s about the carrot, not the stick.
To ensure that trust goes both ways, consistent communication is key. Transparency and clarity, especially around major shifts in HR policy, will strengthen the relationship between workers and leadership moving forwards.
How Do We Revitalise Culture in Remote Workplaces?
Now that we’ve established the benefits and challenges of remote and hybrid work, we’ll expand on how to use culture-building policies to promote togetherness and productivity during home work.
Leaders Must Adapt Their Approach
We’ve already discussed the problems that arise when leadership isn’t aligned with employee feelings about remote work. But what happens when middle managers feel negatively towards hybrid and remote working patterns?
Although hybrid work led overall attrition rates to fall by a third, manager attrition rose by 55%. According to remote work expert Nick Bloom, you could assume by this statistic that managers haven’t enjoyed managing people remotely, but as the same study shows that in pre-hybrid trials, managers were more likely to predict hybrid would lead to a negative outcome. Long story short, managers expected hybrid to fail.
To tackle negativity from middle management, leaders must activate managers for better performance in remote environments. Since most managers end up in the position “accidentally”, it’s important to train them to be able to manage effectively for any eventuality.
Unfortunately, remote working relationships typically lack the same regular feedback that in-person ones support, meaning that the senior leaders are failing to support managers, leading to bad management at the lower levels. It’s time to focus on managerial training, empowerment and accountability. When managers feel positively towards their role, their teams are more likely to succeed.
In short? Train managers adequately to overcome remote work challenges.
Streamline Your Communication
Set a goal for your remote and hybrid communication. While organised business comms are essential, is Slack or Microsoft Teams the best place for social conversations? It may be worth separating types of communication for greater monitoring and collaboration.
For example, Mo’s platform encourages positive communication across all types of workforces, as it replaces the need for an outdated office noticeboard. We’ve taken the best parts of social media (asynchronous posts, tagging, sharing updates) and integrated it with comprehensive recognition and reward capabilities that mean employees feel genuinely appreciated by and connected to their colleagues.
To further improve communications, set out your expectations during onboarding. How often are employees expected to share updates? What is the right amount of time spent in meetings? What video conferencing tools are appropriate?
Set Boundaries Between Employees and Leaders
Following on from the topic of guidelines around communication, it’s just as important to set clear boundaries between work and personal time. Burnout amongst remote employees is as much of a problem as for workers who commute to the office, but it’s often harder to diagnose.
Remote and hybrid workers struggle to delineate between being at work and being at home. Some employees still need to work in a bedroom or at a kitchen table, as we’re not all blessed with enough space for a home office.
Leaders must be role models when it comes to work-life balance. And that includes resisting the urge to message employees about work past 5:30pm!
Bring Teams Together
Having a cohesive company culture is about more than hosting a social once a month (regardless of whether it’s in-person or virtual). Instead, think of your company culture as embodying a set of corporate values. How does your HR policy align with these initiatives?
Bringing your team together means that you need to build a culture that works for everyone in your organisation. It doesn’t matter how much someone is paid or what level of responsibility they possess. The best way to ensure that employees are engaged is to follow these formulae:
Recognition + company values = belonging.
Once you have that in place, belonging = accountability.
With greater accountability at work, your people are more likely to hit their targets. Why? It comes down to psychology. While incentivisation always helps, great work can be accomplished when an employee doesn’t want to let down their team. Ultimately, people just want to feel valued.
Here are five steps you can take in the next six months to improve remote company culture:
- Gather feedback from your employees
- Create a recognition strategy that makes them feel valued
- Set boundaries around communication and work/life balance
- Improve belonging with a culture platform like Mo
- Train managers to encourage collaboration and share feedback
Don’t forget that a positive company culture will only work through consistency. We work with our customers to achieve realistic results that are sustainable over years, including through mergers and redundancies, and have numerous success stories that you can use as inspiration.
Transform your culture with Mo
Book a free demo to learn how Mo can help you:
- 🤝 Improve employee engagement scores
- 🚀 Reduce employee churn
- 😍 Build a collaborative culture
Mo Revitalises Remote Company Culture
Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your company culture in a remote or hybrid work environment, learn more about how to shift the dial at the manager level and transform insights into action. To find out if you’re eligible for our money-back guarantee, book a demo with our team.
