Remote but connected – culture is key for remote employees

Remote work has swiftly shifted from a response to necessity into an enduring feature of New Zealand’s business landscape. According to AUT data, by late 2021, nearly 48% of New Zealanders were hybrid-working, and 15% were fully remote. In this environment, the challenge isn’t just how teams get work done – but how they stay cohesive, engaged, and vibrant.

While physical detachment is real, culture isn’t anchored to locations but to shared values, relationships, and communication practices. Remote teams thrive when purposeful connections replace physical proximity.

The foundations of culture, reimagined for remote work

Here are some pillars employers should reinforce, even more so in distributed environments:

1. Reinforce shared values

Keep your organisation’s ethos alive even when people aren’t side by side. Remind teams of what defines your culture. Whether it’s innovation, empathy, or teamwork, and reinforce these in virtual meetings, emails, and celebrations.

2. Prioritise transparent communication

With offices dispersed, clarity is non-negotiable. Establish regular channels whether via Teams, Slack, or video conferencing for updates, feedback, and community moments.

3. Cultivate rapport through social moments

Replace the informal water-cooler chats with deliberate social experiences: virtual coffee breaks, informal chat channels, or light-hearted meetups.

4. Keep knowledge flowing

Remote setups risk siloing expertise. Encourage employees to share skills or insights via webinars, shared documents, or small-group learning sessions and celebrate effort and impact.

5. Enable meaningful collaboration

Use collaborative platforms like Google Docs, Trello, or Microsoft Teams effectively. Structured, transparent collaboration helps maintain momentum and avoid isolation.

6. Encourage belonging, autonomy, and ownership

Culture thrives when people feel valued. Encourage input, support autonomy, and trust staff to manage their time and contributions – and they’ll respond with commitment and creativity.

7. Mentoring meeting

Ensure managers regularly keep in touch with their staff to see how they’re doing professionally and personally. The meetings can also serve to get a sense point on performance – whether it’s support, development or improvement as well as team culture.

Building culture remotely – the kiwi way

Culture doesn’t retire with remote work

The cultural heartbeat of your organisation doesn’t pause when teams disperse; it needs energising more than ever. Intentional connection, clarity, and shared purpose turn remote work into a strength – not a challenge.

How can Citation HR help?

While creating a strong workplace culture takes time to develop, it’s too important to ignore; for it to be successful, it requires strong leadership from the top down. Citation HR is the people management platform that helps businesses reduce the time they spend on HR admin (by up to 70 per cent) so leaders and managers can focus on more meaningful HR initiatives such as growing culture! Contact us here to learn more.