With more and more teams being decentralized, effective management of virtual teams has become an increasingly complex issue. This is particularly the case if your team is decentralized over multiple time zones or regions. When managing virtual teams, team leaders have to not only think about company culture but also how to unify a disparate team that does not share commonalities such as a shared office space or a shared background.
However, team leaders need to keep in mind that company culture is organic. It cannot be something foisted on to employees in a top-down manner. If a team leader does not listen to the concerns of employees, or does not allow them to give feedback, then people will begin to wonder about the stability of the company. Without a physical meeting space to address these concerns, company gossip and office chatter will be relegated to private Slack DMs and texts, making it impossible to track employee satisfaction. This is why it is especially important to welcome feedback and criticism and allow the company culture to develop around shared values instead of competing interests.
The best way to avoid this scenario is to build relationships with your virtual team. This starts at the onboarding process and should extend throughout someone’s employment at a virtual company. During the onboarding process, you should set up a Zoom call to introduce the new team member to the rest of the team. Onboarding is particularly important for virtual teams as it is hard for people to get an intuitive grasp on company culture when they are working remotely. Using the onboarding process as an opportunity, you can make sure that the new hire feels like they fit right into the team and initiated into the company culture. This will keep their motivation high from the get-go and get the rest of the team excited about working for a new hire.
You also want to make sure that as a team leader you live by the values that you are trying to set with your team. For example, if you believe that work should end at the end of the work day, sending emails or Slack messages at 1am is probably not a great way to demonstrate that is what you want in practice. It’s not just a matter of espousing certain ideals, but rather actually reinforcing them and fostering a virtual work environment that defines the way that people should behave. You can’t pay lip service to certain ideas and not follow them and except people to do the same. You can do this making the employees feel like teammates and not just workers.
Setting a company cultural in a virtual setting is certainty a challenge. Without having dedicated facetime, it can be difficult to manage employees concerns and expectations about their work environment. However, as a virtual team leader, you need to be proactive in addressing concerns and empathizing with employees. Otherwise, they are going to become insular and talk amongst themselves, which is where the true company culture will develop.
