Building An Inclusive Remote Culture

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  Ted CarstensenPlatform Director
  Heavybit

Building and managing an inclusive remote culture is hard work, there’s no way around it. If your own experiences with remote cultures have been poor, it’s all too easy to assume that every remote culture will be an ineffective waste of time. The reality is that the number of distributed teams is on the rise, and the effectiveness of those teams, as well as the quality of their cultures, is following in kind.

At our most recent meetup, we convened a panel of Heavybit community members who have deep experience managing remote teams and cultivating cohesion across multiple languages, time zones, and working styles. The panel was moderated by our Events Manager, Sam Noland, and featured Rainforest Co-Founder and CEO Fred Stevens-Smith, Heroku Vibe Manager Cathy Lee, and Meteor’s Product Designer, Dom Nguyen.

In the video below you’ll learn from this talented group how their respective companies have tackled the hard problems to find success with remote-oriented cultures.

Before you begin, it’s important to understand that ‘building a remote culture’ is not as simple as opening up a #remote Slack channel or running a shared Trello board. A truly cohesive remote culture requires much more than that. A thoughtful, deliberate approach is necessary to ensure success with a distributed team.

With the explosion of team-oriented communications and productivity tools like Slack, Dropbox, and Github, there has never been a better time to check your assumptions and expand your team remotely.

You’ll want to consider the following questions before hiring your first remote employee:

• How will you consistently provide context around decisions made while portions of your team are sleeping?
• What tools will you build your culture around, will they scale to 10, 50, 100 people?
• Are there any roles that you won’t consider remote employees for?
• How will you ensure remote team members are included in the ‘local’ company culture?
• How will you compensate team members in similar positions in different cities with different costs of living?
• Where will ‘HQ’ be, and how often will you bring everyone together in person? Have you built these costs into your operating budget?

Have you built an inclusive culture at your company? We’d love to hear about it on Twitter!

Check out our events calendar to RSVP for upcoming developer focused events, and head over to our Library for more educational content focused on building strong teams and taking your developer product to market.