How to Improve Communication and Culture When Working Remotely

Just because you're remote doesn’t mean your team magically knows how to communicate better or build culture on autopilot.

If anything, it’s the opposite. Messages get missed. Updates get buried in Slack. Someone goes offline and suddenly half the team’s out of sync. Remote work offers flexibility, but without structure, it can quietly erode alignment, clarity, and morale.

We’ve worked with enough distributed teams to know this isn’t about fixing people, it’s about fixing systems. In this blog, we’re sharing a practical approach to making remote communication smoother, keeping your team genuinely connected, and creating a culture that doesn’t disappear the moment everyone logs off Zoom.

Keeping Remote Teams Connected: Ground Rules

In an office, a lot of things don’t need to be said.

You know when someone’s having a rough day. You sense when it’s okay to tap someone for help. You can glance at a manager’s expression and guess how a meeting went. Culture is absorbed by being around it, day after day, over lunch, in between meetings, even in silence.

That doesn’t exist in remote.

There’s no background context. No casual overlaps. No physical space to shape team energy or cue people into what's okay and what’s not. Which means one thing: if you don’t spell things out clearly, they don’t exist.

We’ve seen this play out across plenty of remote teams. Someone assumes async updates mean “no follow-ups needed.” Another person thinks “Slack is urgent, email is optional.” A new hire interprets silence after a big presentation as disapproval when in reality, the team just forgot to react.

These misunderstandings aren’t a sign of dysfunction. They’re a sign that remote work doesn’t come with built-in rules. You have to create them from scratch. And more importantly, you can’t assume that what’s clear in your head is obvious to the rest of the team. That’s the crux of it. In remote, nothing is implied. Everything has to be designed.

Establishing Expectations in Remote Teams: A First Step to Culture

Once you accept that remote work doesn’t come with an instruction manual, the first thing you need is one, tailored to your team. We don’t mean a 50‑page guide nobody reads. Think of it as a living manifesto: “Here’s how we share updates, make decisions, and keep each other in the loop.”

Onboarding should be your golden opportunity here. For example, when GrowthBuddy places someone in a remote role, we walk them through the basics of how the team communicates, the expected response times, and the tools they’ll be using, along with practical tips on how to thrive in a remote setup. Things like crafting clear messages, asking for help early, protecting focus time, and not mistaking silence for disapproval.

When everyone understands who decides what, where problems are flagged, and which threads require a response, you cut straight to the work that matters. No more “Why didn’t I hear back?” or “I thought you’d loop me in.”

People naturally feel less anxious because they know where to look and when to push. This framework becomes the backbone of both your communication and culture: once it’s spelt out, it’s far easier to reinforce every day.

Enforcing Expectations and Accountability (Without Micromanagement)

Remote teams don’t magically become high-performing just because you’ve hired smart people. They need small rituals that remind them they’re part of something bigger than their own to-do list.

Start with short, one-on-one catch-ups. Not the awkward, forced check-ins that feel like status interrogations, just 15-minute nudges to see how they’re doing. These aren’t for micromanaging. They're for listening. For building the kind of trust where someone feels safe saying, “Hey, I’m stuck,” or “I’ve been feeling off this week.” You can’t pick up on body language remotely, so you have to create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up.

At a team level, consider monthly huddles – not to review OKRs, but to give the team a pulse check. A quick call to remind everyone: you're not just a bunch of freelancers on Slack. You’re a team. This is also where lighter moments count. As much as team-building activities can feel like forced fun, they matter more than you think when the default work environment is just… quiet.

Of course, not everyone thrives on social calls or group banter and that’s fine. Some remote cultures are quiet by design, with minimal meetings and deep async work. You get to define what your version looks like. But whatever your version is, stick to it. The worst kind of culture is the one that constantly shifts based on who's asking.

What Your Team Sees (And Remembers) As “Culture”

People won’t remember what you wrote about team culture in the company playbook; they’ll remember how it felt to work with you.

If you say you value deep work but flood Slack with messages at all hours, that’s the culture your team sees. If you talk about transparency but avoid giving honest feedback, your team learns to do the same. Culture in a remote team is built on micro-behaviours, such as whether you cancel 1:1s at the last minute, how you respond when someone misses a deadline, or whether you reply to updates with a thumbs-up or genuine feedback. 

Consider these points:

• When someone messes up, are you reactive or constructive? That reaction teaches more than any values document.

• Do you say you value async, but expect instant replies? Inconsistency like that chips away at trust faster than you think.

• Do you lead with example or just intention? If you want ownership, don’t micromanage. If you want transparency, share your own thinking first.

• Are you making your ways of working visible? People can’t follow what they can’t see. Talk through your decisions. Explain your “why,” not just the task.

All of this adds up. So, if you're wondering how to actually improve your remote team culture, start here.

Make It Easy To Work The Way You Want To Work

If your existing internal systems don’t support the way you expect your team to work, even the best intentions won’t hold. Whether it’s delays in communication, unclear ownership, or scattered information, operational friction quietly chips away at trust, clarity, and team morale.

Write things down. Keep processes visible. Create a central location for all important information, so nothing is left in someone’s head or gets lost in Slack. Document decisions. Make handoffs clear. And design onboarding so new hires don’t have to guess how anything works. 

At GrowthBuddy, we’ve stuck to a simple setup from the start – nothing fancy, just the basics that make communication easier and reduce friction:

• Slack for open team communication instead of scattered messages or siloed DMs

• Notion for all internal docs, processes, templates, and onboarding (so no one has to ask twice)

• Attio as our candidate CRM to keep hiring structured, repeatable, and collaborative

• Loom to record processes and walkthroughs for smoother onboarding and fewer unnecessary meetings

• Fathom to record and summarise meetings automatically; helpful when people miss calls or want to revisit decisions

At a time when there’s an AI tool for nearly every imaginable problem (including problems you didn’t even know existed), no team should be struggling with avoidable bottlenecks. If you're still facing messy handovers or unclear processes, you're probably making your team work harder than they need to. Start with structure. Then layer on tools that reinforce it.

💡 If you want to go deeper into tools that make remote work easier, this list of the best collaboration tools might help.

Conclusion

You can’t simply copy and paste office culture into a remote setup. What feels organic in person has to be intentional online. That means setting clear expectations early, modelling the behaviours you want to see, and building systems that make good communication easy—not something your team has to chase.

At GrowthBuddy, we’ve helped remote-first teams get this right from the start by helping them embed exceptional remote talent that knows how to work autonomously, communicate clearly and plug into your systems without hand-holding. 

If that’s what you’re trying to build, we’d love to help.