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A remote company’s culture is what employees can reliably see in its decisions, communication, expectations, and everyday treatment—not just the values written on a website. To make that culture work across distance, turn values into observable behaviors, document how work gets done, model the standards in management decisions, onboard people deliberately, and make communication and social connection fair across schedules.
What makes remote company culture real?
Culture is the pattern employees experience when they decide what matters, how to ask for help, where to find information, and whether it is safe to raise a problem. Distance makes informal expectations harder to pick up, so leaders need to make important norms explicit and demonstrate them consistently.
GitLab’s handbook recommends articulating values prescriptively and reinforcing them visibly, with no unwritten rules employees are expected to discover on their own. Its examples connect values to hiring, onboarding, feedback, recognition, compensation, promotions, and management decisions. That is a useful test for any remote business: do the organization’s incentives and everyday choices support the behaviors it says it values? GitLab’s values guidance
How should you turn values into everyday behaviors?
Write values in terms of actions employees can recognize. A broad word such as “transparency” is not a working agreement until people know which decisions, updates, and documents they can access. “Flexibility” needs practical expectations for availability and response times. For each value, describe what people should do, what managers should do, and what the organization will reward or correct.
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- Transparency: Identify where decisions and their reasoning are recorded, and which updates are shared with the team.
- Flexibility: Explain how colleagues communicate availability, set response expectations, and hand off work.
- Accountability: Clarify how commitments are tracked and how a person can flag a delay or request help.
Leadership behavior is part of the message. Gallup advises leaders to reinforce purpose, values, and expectations through decisions, communication, and performance management, while managers connect daily work to organizational goals. In its current guide, Gallup attributes 70% of the variance in team-level engagement to managers. That figure describes the relationship Gallup reports; it is not a predicted effect of any one management practice. Gallup’s workplace guide
What belongs in a remote team handbook?
Put recurring expectations in a shared, searchable place rather than relying on an employee being online when someone explains them. A handbook can cover:
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- Where decisions, project updates, and durable reference material are recorded.
- Which communication channels are used for which purposes, and what response time is expected.
- How teams handle urgent issues, request help, and hand work across time zones.
- Which discussions need a meeting and which can be resolved asynchronously.
- Who owns each policy or document, and how employees can suggest an update.
Use tools that fit the organization’s existing work and make information easy to find, access, and maintain. Remote says its handbook and meeting notes are in Notion and its engineering source of truth is GitLab; these are examples of its own setup, not universal requirements. Remote’s account of its culture
How do you onboard people into the culture?
Onboarding is an employee’s first sustained experience of how the organization operates. Treat it as more than an equipment checklist: introduce the organization’s purpose and expectations, provide the access and tools needed to do the job, and help the new hire form working relationships.
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- Explain the organization. Give new hires time to read the values and working agreements, then discuss how they apply to actual decisions and day-to-day work.
- Set up the work. Make sure access, tools, key documents, communication channels, and role priorities are clear.
- Provide a human guide. Pair the employee with a mentor or onboarding buddy who can answer practical questions and explain how stated values show up in real situations.
- Make expectations findable. Direct the employee to written policies and team practices rather than leaving them to infer unwritten norms from whoever happens to be online.
GitLab’s all-remote guidance describes onboarding across organizational, technical, and social dimensions, and recommends discussing values with a mentor or onboarding buddy. GitLab’s all-remote onboarding guide
When should a remote team meet, and when should it work asynchronously?
Choose the format based on urgency, the need for live discussion, available time-zone overlap, and whether colleagues who cannot attend need the outcome later. A live meeting can help when people need to work through ambiguity together; an asynchronous update is often more accessible when a decision or status can be understood in writing. Either way, record important outcomes where the wider team can find them.
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| Choice | Use it when | Make it fair by |
|---|---|---|
| Synchronous discussion | The issue is urgent or benefits from real-time exchange. | Sharing the outcome and decisions with people who could not attend. |
| Asynchronous communication | People can review information and respond without a live conversation. | Writing clearly, allowing reasonable response time, and not making access depend on being online with a manager. |
Remote-first and asynchronous practices can reduce time-zone bias, according to GitLab’s guidance. That does not mean every conversation should be text-based: teams still need live discussion when the work calls for it. The key is to avoid making proximity to a manager or a particular working hour the default route to influence or information. GitLab’s all-remote guide
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How do you collaborate and whiteboard in a remote environment?
Start with the collaboration goal: does the group need to generate ideas together, review a visual artifact, or make and record a decision? Use a live session when simultaneous exchange is valuable, and provide the relevant context or artifact in advance where possible. For colleagues who cannot attend, share the resulting notes, decisions, and next steps in the team’s usual written source of truth. GitLab lists this as a frequently asked question in its all-remote guide, which also emphasizes asynchronous practices for teams with varied schedules. GitLab’s all-remote guide
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How can teams create social connection without making it mandatory?
Offer ways to connect that do not depend on office proximity, while recognizing that employees differ in their appetite for non-work conversation. Options might include coffee chats, virtual lunches, social hours, coworking calls, or interest groups. Make participation an invitation rather than a test of commitment, and consider time zones, accessibility, and the time burden when choosing formats.
GitLab’s informal communication guidance describes coffee chats and other social practices as ways to build relationships. Co-founder Sid Sijbrandij summarizes the intention this way: “When working remote it is important to formalize informal communication. Explicitly plan time to create, build, and maintain social connections and trust.” These are options for creating opportunities to connect, not a guarantee that a ritual will cure loneliness or improve performance. GitLab’s informal communication guidance
How can you tell whether employees experience the culture you describe?
Use manager conversations and appropriate employee feedback channels to check whether people understand priorities, can find the information they need, feel included, and can raise problems. Look for gaps between the stated rules and what employees report experiencing, then address the underlying process or management behavior. Engagement and wellbeing measures can inform that work, but a single score cannot stand in for the whole culture. Gallup’s guidance emphasizes consistent leadership communication and measurement as inputs to managing distributed teams. Gallup’s workplace guide
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