Company culture is one of the basic necessities for employee success and satisfaction, and most organizations hold it in high esteem. Leaders have spent years looking for the best way to promote a positive culture in the organization – to merge the company’s norms, vision, system, habits, belief and values in the most efficient way. Most traditional practices usually only work when your employees are in the same environment, however.

Today, most organizations are facing challenges with the increase in virtual teams, remote workers and a globalised economy. The growth of virtual teams can be attached to the advances in modern technology, which has made it possible to collaborate across borders.

Virtual teams are employees that are either remote, distributed, or telecommuting. Over the years, the number of employees that have gone virtual is on the rise. This has led to pressing challenges; for example, how do you keep a unified culture when your team span across borders?In this article, we will be discussing how you can keep your company culture alive through virtual teams.

Mandate Team Shoutout

When you are left alone to finish up one task or the other, working from home resultsin silo working. If you are not alert, your virtual team will soon become a bunch of employees performing tasks independently without any connection or knowledge of how their contribution impacts the company and other employees.When your virtual team members who are working towards the same objective do not connect with each other, it will lead to company culture destruction and disengagement of employees.

Effective and constant communication should be prioritized between your team, and it should be filled with praise regularly. If you encourage your team to give shoutouts to each other for their efforts and support given during the week, it will increase their level of collaboration and encourage team building. This can help you keep the company culture alive among virtual teams.

Some leaders might shy away from giving praise to their team members for their efforts, but people love to be appreciated for a job well done. Because of this, you should consider giving your virtual team a few minutes during meetings not only to share their experiences but also to give a shout out to an employee who helped them during the week.

Nourish a Meeting Culture within Your Virtual Team

Regular meetings are everything when you work remotely. This is the only time when your employee feels connected and team-oriented. Because of this, it’s important that you plan your meetings in a way that increases your team connection and culture. You also want to create a meeting schedule that won’t change. This steadiness will create a sense of stability among your virtual teams.

In addition to that, you can create bookend meetings for the week – for example, on a Monday morning and Friday evening. Meetings on Mondays should be geared towards creating the intention for the week and Friday meetings will focus on sharing wins and challenges encountered and how you overcame them. This will create learning opportunities for all your employees.

Every meeting should be hosted via video conferencing so that all team members will be able to see one another. Most importantly, it should be an interactive session where all team members must partake in the discussion. Ensure to make communication mandatory in a particular fashion so that your team members can view the meeting as an active session.