How to build culture and manage performance in a remote or hybrid team.

Culture is how people behave when nobody is watching: how decisions are made, how mistakes are handled, what gets praised. In an office, much of it is absorbed by being there. In a remote or hybrid team, it has to be written down, practised and reinforced on purpose. Done well, remote teams can be focused and highly effective. Done badly, people become isolated, priorities drift and problems surface late.

Write down how you operate

Create a short operating guide, a few pages at most, that covers:

• Values in behaviours. Not “we value transparency” but “we share bad news within a day, in the team channel”.
• Communication norms. Which channel for what (chat for quick questions, documents for decisions, calls for discussion), expected response times and core overlap hours.
• How decisions are made and recorded, and who decides what.
• Meeting rules: every meeting has an agenda, an owner and written outcomes.
• Working hours and wellbeing: respect for time zones and time off, and no expectation of instant replies out of hours.

Set a simple operating rhythm

1. Weekly team meeting of 30 to 45 minutes: priorities, key metrics, blockers.
2. Weekly one-to-ones between each person and their manager: their priorities, wellbeing and development, not just status updates.
3. Written updates at the end of each week so progress is visible without extra meetings.
4. Monthly all-hands with company performance, customer stories and recognition.
5. In-person time at regular intervals, if possible, for planning and relationship building.

Manage performance on outcomes

• Set clear goals for each person every quarter, linked to company priorities. Three to five measurable outcomes are enough.
• Give feedback often, not just at reviews. A simple model: describe the situation, the behaviour and its impact, then agree what changes.
• Address underperformance early. Clarify expectations, offer support, set a timeframe and follow a fair process. Acas publishes guidance on handling performance and disciplinary issues fairly; follow it and take advice before any dismissal.
• Recognise contribution publicly and specifically.

Onboard remote hires deliberately

New starters in a remote team cannot pick things up by overhearing. Send equipment and access before day one. Give each new hire a written 30, 60 and 90-day plan, a named buddy outside their reporting line and a short list of people to meet in the first fortnight. Ask for a first small deliverable in week one so they contribute early, and check in daily in the first week, then weekly.

Practical and legal points

• Contracts: state the place of work and any expectations about travel or office days.
• Overseas staff: employing someone who lives in another country brings that country’s employment, tax and social security rules. Take advice before agreeing, or use a local provider.
• Equipment and security: decide who provides devices, and set rules for passwords, device encryption and handling customer data.

Worked example

Thistledown is a fictional Aberdeen tech startup with twelve people across Scotland, England and Portugal, building safety inspection software. Decisions were getting lost in chat threads, two developers had duplicated a feature, and a new salesperson felt cut off. The founding team wrote a four-page operating guide, introduced a written decision log, set two hours of core overlap, moved from daily status calls to written updates plus a weekly meeting, and started quarterly goals with fortnightly one-to-ones. Within a quarter, duplicated effort stopped, and the salesperson’s ramp-up plan, now written and reviewed weekly, had her closing deals in her third month.

Common mistakes

• Replicating the office online with back-to-back video calls.
• Measuring presence (online status, hours logged) rather than outcomes.
• Letting decisions live only in chat.
• Avoiding difficult performance conversations because they feel harder on video.
• Forgetting that employees working from home are still covered by health and safety and data protection duties.

What to measure

• Goal completion each quarter, per person and team.
• Regular, short engagement check-ins, for example a quarterly anonymous survey.
• Voluntary staff turnover.
• Time from a problem arising to it being raised.