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Maintaining A Strong Startup Culture In A Remote Work Environment

Forbes Technology Council

Micah Remley is the CEO of MineralTree, strategically leading his team in creating a friction-less AP process. 

Like most tech startups, or any tech company, for that matter, culture is an extremely important foundation for the success of my company. If we do it well, it creates a positive work environment, helps attract and retain the best people, motivates employees, and keeps us all moving in the right direction. 

As a business leader, I like to think that a lot of our company culture is created intentionally as a result of things we have some control over: hiring and training the right people, setting a clear vision and goals, implementing good processes, demonstrating our company values, and rewarding the right behaviors and results.

Having the team largely together in one space, specifically designed to reflect our team-oriented ideals, was an important way to build and maintain our culture. We could tangibly see the culture being reinforced every day in our office: groups working together to solve customers’ problems and build new products, staff meetings, company social events, people relaxing in the kitchen or game room, or interacting in any number of other ways physically or virtually. Visitors to our offices often commented on the energy. Then Covid-19 hit, and we went fully virtual. Like many of you, we have been left trying to answer the question of how we can build and maintain a strong growth culture in a completely virtual environment.

Plenty of tech companies had remote working environments before Covid, but culture-building was often still done in person. Quarterly meetings at HQ, sales events, team gatherings and other outings helped build culture even if employees worked remotely most of the time. A month or two into the pandemic, with our workforce almost completely virtual and travel and in-person gatherings almost nonexistent, it was clear we were going to have to rewrite our playbook on culture-building and learn as we went along.

As a cloud SaaS company, we already fully leveraged collaboration tools like G-Suite, Slack and Zoom prior to the pandemic, so we were able to kick them into high gear. This filled part of the gap and allowed us to focus on teamwork and culture building. But after a few weeks of Zoom happy hours, it was clear we needed to be more structured in our approach. If you found yourself in the same boat with your startup, here are a few ideas you can apply based on our experience:

• Overcommunicate: If your company had regular all-hands company meetings once a month to discuss progress to goals, major product releases, customer wins, and the like, consider doing what we did and schedule weekly 45-minute town halls with the entire company. It’s a bigger commitment, but we find the connection and alignment it creates invaluable. You should aim to cover a variety of topics, from product releases and sales wins to best practices working remotely.

Early on, we featured different employees talking about how they were managing, describing their daily routine, how they were navigating different challenges and what was and wasn’t working. It helped keep people connected personally and led to some really good idea-sharing. In our employee surveys, the town halls consistently rank as a bright spot for employees since we went remote.

• Emphasize informal discussions: Make your leadership team more accessible via both structured and unstructured opportunities. In the office, we all had the opportunity to informally speak to a large number of teammates from different groups every day.

Find ways to replace this "management by walking around" in the virtual world. Create opportunities to get together informally with small teams or have quick virtual chats one on one. We schedule Zoom lunches, reach out for quick discussions and ping people on Slack just to say hello. One of our managers has even set up virtual coffee breaks so people can informally stop in. Think about it as taking the time you used to spend traveling before the pandemic and reallocating it to create informal opportunities to connect with your team.

• Adjust hiring practices: Your hiring and new employee onboarding processes are probably very different as well. Gone are the culture-reinforcing days of face-to-face interviews, recruiting lunches/dinners or walking a new employee around the office to introduce them to their new teammates.

We are trying to make up for this by being more rigorous in our interview process. Candidates meet with a broad cross-section of the team, including one or more of the leadership team, before an offer is made. We also added structure to the employee onboarding process. In place of in-person orientation, each new employee gets a customized onboarding experience that includes one-on-one virtual meetings with the executive team. The feedback has been excellent. Even in this virtual world, candidates often tell us they can “feel” our culture. 

• Keep trying new approaches: As much as we have done, we still have a lot to learn. Our culture was (and still is) very team-oriented. We are constantly trying new things, experimenting, failing, learning and succeeding together as a group. Our team was also very active in our community, with groups of employees contributing their time and expertise to a variety of causes. Those sorts of things are obviously more difficult right now, so focus on opportunities for individuals to give back to the community in their own ways. 

What’s next? As the year-end approaches, we all will miss out on normal culture-building activities such as holiday parties, team gatherings and annual company kickoffs. Ask yourself how you can replace these events in the virtual world. It’s obviously more difficult to celebrate successes together when everyone is remote, so we just have to get a little more creative to fill the void. 

Companies are expected to adapt and evolve as they grow. Culture is part of that evolution. Remember that company culture is the attitude and mindset that you’ve built — not the physical workspace you occupy. Time will tell how much our company cultures adjust as a result of our new work environments. 


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