Three important steps to building a best-in-class remote workplace culture

Workplace culture has always been essential – but in the last 18 months, a strong, unified company culture has been more important than ever.

At a time when millions of employees have had to work remotely, separated physically from colleagues for months at a time, company culture has been the golden thread tying decentralised workplaces together.

At Vantage Towers, we started our business in the heart of lockdown. It is a business we founded, nurtured and grew out of our home offices spread over the whole of Europe so the sense of common purpose created by physical offices was never really an option to us. Instead, we worked with the Team with the involvement of all employees  to build a culture that could transcend the need to be actually ‘together’ and create unity wherever our colleagues were based. It is these principles that were integral to our recent listing on the MDAX index – something which our CEO, Vivek Badrinath, recently recounted in a post of his own.

At the heart of our culture are four core principles that our teams live and work by: Honesty, Accountability, Respect and Teamwork.

But as an HR leader, how can you create a company culture that exists outside of an office? How do you develop a unified set of principles that will make employees feel part of a team, when your main touchpoints are over Zoom calls?

Here are three important things I learned from creating a remote workplace culture:

Targets must be balanced with policies, initiatives and action

At the very core of Vantage Towers is the desire to create a workplace that reflects the diversity of the world we live in.

To really instil this into our company culture, we made this one of the foundational building blocks of the business, matching our diversity targets with affirmative action across the business. This means that we have a range of inclusivity policies around areas such as recruitment that help us hire staff solely based on skillset and talent, rather than any other irrelevant factors.

For me, driving the culture you want to see in a remote environment is about making sure that important principles, such as diversity and inclusion, aren’t just about distant target setting. Instead, it’s about a root and branch mindset approach that lets employees and prospective hires understand wherever they are that Vantage Towers is an inclusive business.

A trust-by-design approach drives greater entrepreneurialism

Working remotely as a business requires a leap of faith on behalf of companies to trust that staff are doing the job that they have been hired to do.

Starting out in lockdown, we assumed a trust-by-design approach to staff management and made this a key part of our culture from the very beginning. Working in eight regions across Europe, we have to believe that our colleagues are doing the jobs they were hired for. After all, there’s simply no way one could manually check up on employees.

The results have been really encouraging. We want Vantage Towers to be a super flat and agile organisation that promotes entrepreneurialism. Making employees accountable for their own actions fosters a feeling of ownership amongst staff, giving them the autonomy to make decisions and adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. Moreover, it is an speed-booster because the involved people decide!     

Be agile – don’t just talk about it

Finally, it’s very easy to talk about agility but without actually putting anything in place to promote it. We soon realised that, in a remote setting, you can very quickly become mired in endless internal calls and on long email chains.

So we made a commitment within our culture to keep up the sort of energy you would usually find in an office by being as direct and transparent as possible. We encourage staff to pick up the phone or drop a quick message to colleagues, fostering a sense of speed and decision-making.

Anyone can pick up the phone to Vivek, our CEO, too – that’s how transparent and lean we want the business to be!

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Even as lockdowns start to lift, hybrid working looks set to be the norm for millions of employees across Europe. With that in mind, a culture that transcends the need to be physically together will continue to be vital. I’m delighted to say that the culture we’re building has been key to some of our great successes over the last few months.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on company culture over lockdown – what worked well, what hasn’t worked so well. Do comment below!