How to Build a Great Remote Company Culture

Successfully building a remote culture requires unwavering commitment from company leaders, and when you get it right, the benefits compound over time. Remote teams require more investment in the people team, better communication, and a higher level of proactive transparency than colocated teams. However, these are all things that benefit the company and its velocity as you grow and scale. Not to mention, you have access to a lot more talent. 

Being remote-first has given us the chance to build a team that just wouldn’t have been possible if we had stayed tethered to a brick and mortar office. Of course, access to a broader talent pool has to be earned. You have to build a company people want to work for and a culture people want to be part of.

We've been remote since 2011 and currently have 130 people on our remote team from more than 18 countries around the world. In April 2025, our employee engagement score (via a Lattice survey) was 82% favorable — a full ten points higher than the average tech company. Identifying and embracing a few key principles, along with a lot of hard work, enabled us to get to this point.

The goal of this post is to share the lessons we’ve learned so you can decide if remote-first  is right for you and apply what’s useful to your team.

‘Remote-first’ or don’t bother

Let’s be honest: Each way of working (remote, in-person, multi-office, or hybrid) has pros and cons to be mindful of. That said, if you want remote company culture to be all or part of your culture mix, you need to be all in.

These days we’re seeing many companies flip-flop. They praised the efficiency and value of remote work during the pandemic, only to backpedal with hybrid schedules or rigid return-to-office (RTO) mandates that come with vague promises of “better connection.” While it’s true that closer proximity provides more opportunity for relationship building, it takes more than getting everyone in the same room once or twice a week to create a good company culture.

While Help Scout no longer has a physical office, we used to maintain spaces in both Boston and Boulder. Neither had a beer fridge, ping pong table, whiteboard, or office perks. We did this intentionally, so whether in-office or at home, everyone had the same benefits. We also focused on good habits when it came to written communication and documentation so that everyone had the same information. If you operate using the hybrid philosophy, you can keep the employee experience equitable by embracing remote-first practices like the ones outlined in this article.

At Help Scout, we don’t view remote work as an employee perk but rather as a part of our DNA. It started as a survival strategy — early on, the company was based in Boston, and two of our co-founders, Jared and Denny, needed to work from Nashville. Plus, Boston was home to big names like HubSpot and Tripadvisor. As a new company, competing with them for local, high-quality talent wasn’t realistic, so we needed to adopt a different playbook.

Our goal was simple then, and it still is: We want to work with smart, driven people who push us to do our best, regardless of their location. We’ve built a culture that supports that. If you don’t plan on creating an equitable experience when going hybrid or if you plan to force everyone to RTO when the winds change direction, then remote probably isn’t the right choice for you.

Slow down the hiring process

Speaking of competition, anyone looking for work will tell you that the job market is pretty wild right now. If we wanted to, we could easily fill our open roles within a matter of days. But we’ve learned that speed usually comes at the expense of quality.

It takes an average of about 60 days for us to fill a role and roughly a month for a candidate to go through the full process. In addition to interviews, every role includes a paid project which is designed for the person to spend a few hours showing us what they can do. We like to go back and forth, giving folks critical feedback and simulating what it would be like to work together.

Aside from giving us a chance to test the waters, an intentional hiring process like ours can also be a wonderful candidate experience. It lets them get to know several people on the team and gives them time to decide if it’s the right fit.

Lastly, we’ve found that when the process is more thorough and involves more people on the hiring team, it’s easier to steer clear of unconscious bias.

Recruit to diversify the hiring pool

There’s been a shift from promoting and valuing diversity in the workplace lately. But, the data is abundantly clear: Diverse companies are more successful. In fact, according to McKinsey, “companies in the top quartile for both gender and ethnic diversity in executive teams are on average nine percent more likely to financially outperform their peers.”

At Help Scout, we’re still committed to DEI because we know it makes us better. We do proactive recruiting to even out the hiring pool. Without proactive efforts to make the applicant pool a reflection of the general population, it would be almost impossible to build a team with varied opinions, perspectives, and experiences.

Homogenized teams come with blind spots that get in the way of creativity and innovation. Think about ad or website copy that misses the mark, or, worse yet, is unintentionally offensive. Or design choices that make your product or website less accessible. There are plenty of ways things can go wrong, and lots of them can be avoided by ensuring that you’re not making decisions in an echo chamber.

As a remote team, your opportunity to hire people from underrepresented groups is far greater. It’s important to make the most of that opportunity and prioritize hiring a recruiter to source diverse candidates.

Seek people who love the work

A common issue at companies where execs are demanding a RTO is a lack of trust; managers don’t believe their employees are working unless they can see them. We don’t really have that problem, and it’s likely tied to the type of people we hire.

We look for people who love what they do and just need a culture that will give them enough ownership to do their best work. When you give people that space — that trust — to follow their intuition, dig into challenges that interest them, and manage their own time, the results speak for themselves. If you want to promote a healthy remote culture, focus less on whether someone’s status is green on Teams or Slack and more on their impact.

Focus on communication skills

A culture’s effectiveness revolves around how information flows. Everyone needs to feel like they have access to the same knowledge, but remote and colocated cultures share information differently.

In-office teams tend to disseminate information via things like impromptu meetings, whiteboard sessions, chats at the proverbial water cooler, and when grabbing lunch or drinks after work. When you adopt a similar approach to working remotely — quick huddles without documented outcomes, conversations siloed in DMs, and employees without a way to organically gather information — people will start to feel out of the loop.

To avoid this, you need to standardize communication when you go remote. All company information needs to be recorded and available for people to consume async, and you’ll have to adopt a level of transparency that feels uncomfortable at first so everyone feels connected with the business.

Most of your communication will need to be written, and people who aren’t excellent written communicators may struggle on remote teams. However, there are plenty of tools that can help bridge the gap, like Loom for recording short videos and AI software that can help with cleaning up documentation.

You’ll also want to create a standard for when, where, and how employees are expected to share information. For instance, we have a transparent process for decision-making that includes a dedicated #decision-records Slack channel that lets everyone in the company know when a decision has been made, what its impact is to the business, and where to direct any follow-ups.

Be intentional about relationship building

In a remote culture, it’s easier to be productive, but one of the tradeoffs you make is that it’s not as natural to develop a connection with your coworkers. To combat the problem, we put effort into relationship-building.

There are a lot of reasons to do this, ranging from keeping employees engaged to further improving cross-company comms. After all, you’ll be a lot more likely to reach out to someone if you’ve actually spoken to each other before!

Some of the things that have helped us include:

• Fika — A Swedish tradition that is basically grabbing coffee with someone. Throwing a 15-30 minute fika on someone's calendar is a great way to put work aside, get to know each other better, and connect over shared interests.

• Luna Park — A game engine that allows folks to connect for a bit of casual gaming.

• Annual company retreats and quarterly leadership off-sites — In-person get togethers where the team can meet and connect face to face.

• Employee resource groups (ERGs) — Spaces (Slack channels, Zoom calls, sessions at retreat, etc.) where people can come together with others who share the same identities or lived experiences.

We also put a lot of work into our management training and support programs. It’s a lot harder being a manager in a remote culture than it is in a colocated one, and we want to ensure that we’re setting up both managers and their teams for success.

Create clear career paths

When employees are in-office, it can be easier for them to spot opportunities for advancement and build relationships with mentors who can help them get there. However, in a remote culture, this may not happen organically, which means you need to build it into the way your business operates.

At Help Scout, we have two distinct career paths: manager and individual contributor (IC). This may seem unusual as many people view climbing the ladder from IC to manager as the “goal,” but not everyone wants, or is suited, to manage. And even if an engineer, designer, or support team member isn’t a manager, they should still be able to progress in their career.

We have performance review cycles twice a year which serve as planned opportunities for managers to work with their direct reports to better understand which path they ultimately want to be on and to help them create a game plan for how to get there. Building career development and growth plans into your remote culture ensures that no one ever feels like their career is stunted or that they’re being left behind.

Optimize for work-life harmony

Remote work skeptics often claim that people work less at home, but that hasn’t been our experience. The fact is, when you hire people who love the work, some end up working straight through the day without even realizing it. Of course, working non-stop isn’t good either, which is why we optimize for work-life harmony in our operating cadence and benefits packages. 

For instance, in addition to each employee’s allotment of PTO and holidays, we also take two week-long, company-wide breaks each year to allow the entire business* to step away. We also offer paid sabbaticals every four years, time off for volunteering in the community, and learning stipends (and time off for the learning) to support our employees’ growth and development.

Remote workers need things pulling them away from work, like family, hobbies, and other passions, but along with that, they need a company culture that supports and encourages those activities. When you build work-life harmony into your culture, three great things happen: Employees don’t burn out, they do their best work, and they’re happy working at your company.

*We’d be remiss if we didn’t give a hat tip to our support team and our on-call engineers who keep the lights on during these breaks so that our customers are always well-supported.

Invest in remote team culture

Remote or not, the culture you build is a direct result of the time, effort, and resources you put into it. In hindsight, one of the smartest things we’ve done as a company is invest in people ops. 

Many of the issues faced by colocated companies at 50, 75, and 100 people actually have to be addressed in a remote culture at 10, 20, and 35. This was certainly true for Help Scout, which is why we invested in our people team early. In fact, the majority of the things touched on in this post are all in place thanks to our VP of People, Leah Knobler, and her team.

Leah’s team creates benefits packages, manages the hiring and onboarding experience, leads our DEI efforts, plans company retreats, runs training for managers and ICs, comes up with new ways to encourage engagement, and collects feedback so we know if Help Scout is living up to employee expectations. 

If you’re looking to create a successful remote-first culture, you need to invest in your people team, because a good culture doesn’t just happen — you have to work at it!

Build a remote-first company that lasts

To build a successful remote business, you need to foster a great remote culture that helps everyone in your business feel seen, respected, and fulfilled. All of the areas we’ve touched on in this piece will help you get there. However, most of them are also helpful in hybrid or in-person work environments, too. 

Good relationships, clear communication, and work-life balance — these are all just ingredients of a good company culture, period. So, even if remote work isn’t for you, we hope you spend some time thinking about what you can do to empower your team to do their best work.