Are Remote Teams Less Effective Than Onsite Teams?

Remote teams are not necessarily less effective than onsite teams, but there are unique challenges to managing or being in a remote team.

Before we talk about those unique challenges, it is important to point out that most research on remote workers seem to indicate that they are much more productive than workers coming to an office everyday. Here are a couple links to studies that point to that evidence:

To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home

Are Remote Workers Happier And More Productive? New Survey Offers Answers

You can google more but an overwhelming amount of evidence points to greater levels of satisfaction and productivity of remote workers.

The downside or challenges of this stem from creating a common culture and creating a sense that you are part of a team. The isolation of working remote can be a challenge to building relationships that are critical to building team trust and establishing a commitment to the larger mission of the team / organization.

Communication technology (Slack, MS Teams, Skype and Zoom) can help keep the flow of communication working well but oftentimes establishing relationships with others occurs in the day to day interactions had around the proverbial water cooler. It is face to face or across the cube that you learn about the unique challenges that people are faced with on a day to day basis in their personal lives or the meaningful relationships they have outside of work. This helps build empathy and understanding that working remote doesn’t often afford.

To see the original Quora question and answer you can click here.

To see more about how Cloverleaf can help you build empathy, understanding and trust in remote teams click here.

What is the Ideal Company Culture?

The ideal company culture is the one that allows you to execute your strategy in an effective way.

I know that is a bit of a cop out, but the reality is there is no one ideal company culture and each culture should be the right mix for the people that in your organization and is built to allow your people to do the best work they were hired to do.

This means each organization should have a different culture. After all, culture is created by people and every organization is made up of a different set of people. We founded Cloverleaf on the premise that culture is created by the collection of individuals that are a part of the organization. And at the most basic level a team has its own unique culture. This is why even in large, established organizations you will find many subcultures exist across the organization. IT and Sales often have completely different cultures inside the same organization.

Oftentimes I see teams or organizations try and emulate other cultures. This happens frequently with organizations in the midwest that try and create “startup culture” by adding beer kegs and ping pong tables. But the reality is it is the mix of day to day to motivators that influence decisions that often have the biggest influence on culture.

For example, a manager that says quality is most important but when confronted with production targets places efficiency over small decisions that contribute to a quality process / product. Employees notice these subtle shifts or incongruence and it will impact morale and ultimately culture.

Oftentimes organizational culture is heavily influenced by the founders and reinforced with hiring practices. When we started Cloverleaf we invested time early to identify values we wanted in the people we hired. After all, these values are key factors in creating the culture you want. We looked at ourselves and the characteristics that had been instrumental in getting us to key milestones as an early stage startup and identified the following values and embedded them in hiring practices to ensure we hired people that could reinforce this on a day to day basis:

• Relationships Matter - We are interdependent.
• Authenticity - the whole person matters.
• Optimistic Persistence
• Bring delight to work.
• Curiosity for growth
• Candor

You can read the original Quora post here.