How to scale culture beyond your four walls
The Lemonly EFFORT Model of Remote Work Culture
Update: We’re doing our part to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Starting Monday, March 16th, Lemonly will be working remotely until further notice. Read more about our updated policy at the link below.
From the beginning, Lemonly has valued company culture. We’ve tried not only to design sweet visual content for the world, but also to create a company where employees feel respected, challenged, and wanted. In fact, we’ve always believed that cultivating a strong company culture was the best way to produce the best work possible. So far, that’s worked.
But Lemonly also values remote work, and has from the beginning. Currently, four of our seventeen employees work remotely full-time, and the remainder of the team works remotely at least part of each week. I’ve found that reconciling these two values—company culture and remote work—take strategy. Or, as we like to say at Lemonly, it takes EFFORT.
Let’s break that down with the Lemonly EFFORT Model of Remote Work Culture.
EFFORT
Experiment
If you’ve never tried working remotely—or if your workplace doesn’t have a remote work policy (yet)—then experimenting is your first step. Try it out! Start by asking your boss if you can work from home the first Thursday of the month on a trial basis. Then when that day comes around, wake up early and work hard; show your boss that you can be productive away from the office. No boss is going to say, “No, I’d rather you be in the office and do less work.”
Experiment with remote work and show your team that you can be productive, reachable, and collaborative at a distance. Hopefully your success will help make remote work part of your company’s regular routine.
Find Water Cooler Moments
In common conceptions of the traditional office, employees bond by “shooting the breeze” around a water cooler. Even if water coolers have gone out of style, the basic idea remains: Your team needs time to hang out at work together. With this in mind, Lemonly has convened a Wellness Task Force (WTF) whose aim is to promote wellness and camaraderie in the office. WTF periodically schedules activities like team yoga sessions over lunch or provides a wholesome breakfast for the office. These are our water cooler moments.
But what about remote employees? Well, each time WTF brings breakfast for the office, we send our remote workers $7 or $8 on PayPal to go buy something healthy for breakfast, maybe a green smoothie. Occasionally, they’ll post a photo of their purchase in the WTF Slack channel for everyone to see.
The point? When dreaming about team bonding, don’t leave out your remote workers. Get creative and help them feel connected and included — because they are.
Free Your Information
Another way to promote your remote work culture is through open communication. For instance, our employee handbook is published on the web for everyone to access and all our team conversations happen in Slack. When we introduce a new policy or benefit, we create a dedicated channel for conversation and questions around that topic so all the information is open and accessible to everyone.
We also make a point to gather everyone together on a weekly basis. On Monday mornings at Lemonly, all team members gather — in person or online — for an “All Call” meeting. One aim of this meeting is to update employees on recent and current projects, as well as our company numbers from the week. It doesn’t matter if you live in Sioux Falls or Vancouver: If you work for Lemonly, you deserve to know this information. By sharing it freely, we keep everyone on the same page and continue striving toward our shared goals.
Over-communicate
Let’s face it: Remote work requires you to trust your employees. You simply can’t know everything they are doing around the clock when out of the office. (For what it’s worth, restricting employees to a brick-and-mortar office doesn’t necessarily resolve this issue either, as any team manager can tell you.) Just don’t let that stop you. Of course you should trust your employees—you hired them, after all! But you can also mitigate confusion and ambiguity through overcommunication.
In a collaborative and creative work environment like Lemonly, we need to know where you work, what you’re working on, and when they’re working on it. It’s not micromanagement; it’s simply the best way to keep all the parts moving in the same direction. It doesn’t have to be complicated, either. Throughout the day at Lemonly, employees regularly update their Slack emoji status to inform the team about where they are, when they’re taking a lunch break, why they’re unexpectedly logging off for thirty minutes (life happens!), and so on.
A final word of advice on this. It’s easy to ease up on these kinds of expectations as needed, but it’s much harder to implement overcommunication with a team already entrenched in bad communication habits. So start with high standards. Your communication is your culture; your culture is your communication.
Retreat
Remote work works. Still, we make sure to get the whole team together in person a few times a year. We’ll do some work, but we’ll also spend some good time “around the water cooler,” breaking bread, seeing a baseball game, exploring a new city — whatever promotes camaraderie and Lemonly’s values. Remote workers are not merely faces on a webcam or Slack messages; nor are they merely workers. They are humans, like everyone in the office.
If you can, get your whole team together in the same room now and then. They will thank you and, ideally, leave excited to continue working together.
Take the Culture with You
Like a remote team, a healthy culture should transcend the four walls of its company. That’s because company culture is more about an ethos than a place. Each of your employees carries a spark of that ethos with them wherever they go, including those who work far away. Instilling our core values — adventure, collaboration, and integrity — in our employees takes more than a few pennants on the wall (though we have those, too). It takes months and years of intentionality, touching all dimensions of your operation. It takes, well, EFFORT!
When your company culture runs deep, your remote workers can enjoy and contribute to it as much as anyone else. After all, what is company culture without the people?
More Remote Work Resources
- Tips, tools, and best practices for remote work [Video]
- How remote designers give and receive constructive feedback [Video]
- Who can work remotely? How do you ensure culture fit among remote employees? [Video]
- The recipe for remote work success [Video]
- Tips and tricks for working from home [Infographic]
- Illustration tips and tools for remote designers [Blog]
Do you have other suggestions, tips, or best practices for working remotely? Does your company have a great remote work policy, or do you need help creating one? I’d love to hear from you! Tweet me at @johntmeyer.
