Building and sustaining intentional company culture in a remote world

Executive overview

Brett Putter, CEO of CultureGene, argues that culture is not a side effect of office proximity — it is a deliberate operating system that must be designed, documented, and maintained regardless of where people work. Most companies relied on osmosis to transmit culture when everyone shared a building; remote and hybrid work has exposed how fragile that approach always was. The solution is to make values concrete through defined expected behaviors, to adopt the nine best practices pioneered by fully-remote companies, and to engineer social connection and well-being into the daily rhythm of work. Leaders who treat culture as an intentional asset — not a wall poster — see it become a powerful magnet for the right people and a natural filter that ejects those who do not fit.

Why values fail without behavioral definition

• Most companies create values as a tick-box exercise and then leave them on a website or wall with no follow-through.
• Values only become real when expected behaviors are defined: what does living this value look like, and what is unacceptable?
• Defined behaviors make values rewardable, recognizable, and enforceable — the three levers that embed them.
• Bernard (EdTech CEO) lost three-quarters of his senior leadership when his underdeveloped values gave no binding force during a crisis.
• After rebuilding with meaningful, lived values, he grew the business significantly — demonstrating culture as a recoverable asset.
• Aspiration and current reality should both appear in a value set; the tension between them drives healthy stretch.

Bringing values to life: concrete examples

• ElGoliath (enterprise search) spotted a gap between its stated inclusion value and its 5% diverse engineering team; it built a dedicated diverse-hiring function and doubled diversity within a year.
• SkimLinks founder placed the kitchen — and a toaster — at the center of the office so employees smelled toast on arrival, triggering feelings of home, comfort, and safety; small sensory design choices signal cultural intent.
• Jellyvision gives every new hire a spontaneous standing ovation at the end of their first day — a low-cost, high-impact gesture that communicates belonging immediately.
• Walking into a client's office and finding the physical environment inconsistent with stated values (cheap furniture vs. "top quality") is an instant credibility signal; leaders inside the culture often cannot see this gap themselves.
• Strong, well-articulated values are magnetic in both directions: attracting aligned people and naturally ejecting those who cannot live them.

The remote-work gap and why osmosis no longer works

• Office-based companies relied on 12–13 environmental factors — proximity, body language, informal hallway conversations, visibility — none of which transfer automatically to remote work.
• The rapid shift to remote created communication channel chaos: unclear norms around Slack vs. email vs. Zoom, meeting cadence, and expected response times.
• Back-to-back video calls with no transition time eliminates the decompression that commutes and office movement previously provided.
• Tech companies adapted more easily because flexible and remote work was already part of their culture; the broader market is still feeling the pinch.
• GitLab (1,300 employees, fully remote for 10 years) publishes an 8,000-page public company manual — radical transparency as a culture-transmission tool.

Nine best practices from fully remote companies

• Process the business: document procedures that previously lived only in people's heads; one source of truth replaces tribal knowledge.
• Structured one-to-ones: weekly 30-minute conversations where the employee sets the agenda, focused on human connection rather than task status.
• Smaller team sizes: teams capped at around six people preserve the social density needed for trust to develop.
• Deliberate social connection: build activities and rituals that create community, because you cannot replicate the office but you can engineer belonging.
• Well-being focus: remote isolation is the first step toward burnout; leaders must proactively and sensitively surface conversations about mental health and workload.
• Radical transparency about personal context: leaders who model vulnerability (sharing their own scheduling constraints, family realities) create permission for teams to do the same.
• Explicit communication norms: define which channel is for what, when responses are expected, and what meetings are for.
• Repetition of message: without passive environmental reinforcement, leaders must repeat core messages until teams can mock-imitate them — that is the signal it has landed.
• Intentional onboarding: culture transmission to new hires must be designed, not assumed; the informal welcome does not happen by accident online.

Building trust and psychological safety at a distance

• Trust historically relied on visible presence; with hybrid and fully-remote teams, trust must now be built through transparency because there is nothing to hide when everything is visible.
• Creating psychologically safe spaces — where people can share childhood experiences, conflict styles, and personal struggles — measurably elevates team trust.
• Leaders who name their own difficulties (childcare, schedule constraints) give explicit permission for team members to be authentic rather than perform professionalism.
• Human moments on video calls — a child running in, a dog barking — are net positives; they humanize interactions that otherwise lack body language.
• Acknowledging real-world events (political upheaval, public crises) rather than suppressing them prevents distracted disengagement during important sessions.

Celebration, recognition, and the human calendar

• Many companies forget to celebrate; the absence of recognition around birthdays and work anniversaries is consistently reported as a significant morale gap in employee surveys.
• Anniversaries in particular carry high emotional weight — employees have invested years of life and expect acknowledgment in return.
• Celebration rituals do not need to be expensive; the Jellyvision standing ovation costs nothing and creates a rock-star moment most people have never experienced.
• Remote environments require deliberate scheduling of celebration because spontaneous in-office recognition no longer happens naturally.
• Leaders who celebrate both individual milestones and collective wins reinforce the message that people — not just output — are valued.

Recruiting and onboarding as culture amplifiers

• Culture should be woven into hiring criteria from the first interaction; matching candidates to values (not just skills) was the "missing link" Putter observed in his executive search career.
• When founder and new executive are deeply value-aligned, onboarding is almost effortless — they finish each other's sentences and integrate at speed.
• Onboarding must explicitly teach what the values mean and what behaviors are expected; new hires cannot absorb this through osmosis in a remote environment.
• A strong culture self-selects: people who cannot live the values tend to self-eject over time, which is the best outcome for all parties.
• CultureGene's software platform (culturegene.ai) is designed to help distributed teams make culture visible, tangible, and operational.