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People ask me, fairly often, how we keep a real company culture when a good share of the people we work with aren't in the building. There's usually a little skepticism baked into the question — the assumption that culture is something that happens in a room, and that if you don't all share the room, you don't really have one.
I used to half-believe that myself. I don't anymore.
What we think culture is
When most people picture company culture, they picture the trappings: the office, the team lunches, the whiteboard sessions, the hallway run-ins that turn into good ideas. Those things are nice. But they're the setting, not the thing itself. Strip the building away — and working with developers in other places strips it away whether you planned for it or not — and what's left is the actual culture: how you treat people, how you communicate when it's inconvenient, how you behave when something breaks.
If your culture can't survive without the building, it was never as strong as you thought.
A person who taught me this
A while back we started working with a developer none of us had met in person. On paper he was the "remote" one, the outsider. In practice he turned out to be more a part of the team than some people who sat fifty feet from me. He wrote things down clearly. He asked his questions in the open instead of in private. He showed up — on the call, in the thread, in the work. Nobody ever had to wonder where he stood.
It wasn't where he sat that made him part of the team. It was how he worked, and how we chose to work with him.
The part that isn't free
Here's what I've learned, though: distributed culture doesn't happen by accident, and the tools alone won't save you. The tools are practically free now — we can chat, share a screen, and see each other's faces for the cost of a wifi connection. That's not the hard part anymore.
The hard part is intention. It's writing the decision down so the person who wasn't on the call isn't a second-class citizen. It's not letting an in-office in-group quietly form. It's remembering that "we settled it at lunch" means half your team wasn't there. None of that is hard to understand — it's just easy to skip when you're busy, and skipping it is exactly how a distributed team rots from the inside.
I wrote at the start of last year that resolutions don't work but goals do — that the difference is doing the unglamorous thing on the days you don't feel like it. Culture is the same. It isn't the offsite. It's the hundred small choices to include the people who aren't in the room, made on the ordinary days when no one is watching.
Where this leaves us
I've stopped treating "remote" as a compromise we put up with and started treating it as a test we either pass or fail on purpose. The companies that pass aren't the ones with the best perks. They're the ones whose culture was always about how they treat people — and who figured out that a door was never what was holding it together.