The #1 challenge of companies working remotely is ensuring your team feels aligned with the company culture, connected, and driven by company goals and values.  

In fact, 76% of employees say they'd be more loyal to companies offering flexible, meaningful workplace experiences.

At Gable, we know a thing or two about how to help remote employees feel connected, so we’re bringing you these 18 ideas to try:

Breaking down communication silos

Employee engagement and connection in remote teams start with a positive and functional work environment. Transparent, clear communication across departments and time zones is foundational, especially considering that 60% of remote employees cite lack of communication as their biggest challenge.

By proactively bridging these gaps, leaders can prevent isolation, ensure alignment on shared goals, and foster a strong sense of belonging and purpose among employees.

Here are three practical ways to break down communication silos and empower remote teams:

1. Cross-department connections

Remote teams often operate within their communication channels, creating blind spots for other departments' actions. 74% of employees feel disconnected from cross-departmental initiatives when working remotely.

To foster meaningful cross-team connections, try these practical strategies for check-ins:

• Team highlight sessions: Use virtual meetings where each department shares an overview of current projects, key objectives, and ways they collaborate with other teams.

• Cross-functional meetings: Invite product and engineering team members to join sales or customer success calls and vice versa, fostering mutual understanding and cooperation across teams. Consider setting up co-working days as a kick-off to this initiative.

• Shared call recordings: Record customer interactions and ensure easy access for all departments, offering transparency into external conversations and highlighting everyone's role in customer experience.

These small yet powerful initiatives foster transparency and alignment, reinforcing remote teams' sense of belonging and collective purpose.

2. User manuals for remote workers

Remote teams often juggle different time zones, communication styles, and work preferences, leading to misunderstandings and frustration.

Personal user manuals can help team members quickly understand their teammates' working habits and preferences - such as ideal collaboration hours, preferred messaging channels, and personal working styles.

Here’s how you can integrate user manuals effectively:

• Include in onboarding: Make creating a user manual part of every new hire's onboarding, helping them quickly introduce themselves and their work style to colleagues.
• Centralized access: Link each employee’s user manual in their Slack or Microsoft Teams profile for instant visibility.
• Regular updates: Encourage team members to periodically update their user manuals to reflect any changes in their schedules or work preferences.

Using these guides reduces confusion and streamlines daily interactions, allowing your team to collaborate confidently.

3. Guidelines for effective remote work communication

Clear communication guidelines help remote teams navigate daily interactions smoothly, boosting teamwork and reducing confusion. Clarifying when, how, and where to communicate empowers employees to connect more effectively with colleagues.

Make sure your communication guidelines cover:

• Channel clarity: Specify which communication tools (Slack, email, Zoom, etc.) are appropriate for specific messages, meetings, or project updates.
• Response expectations: Define expected response times so remote workers feel less pressured and can set realistic boundaries.
• Meeting best practices: Establish standards for scheduling, running, and following up on team meetings.

Recognizing employees

Recognition is a powerful way to show remote employees their work matters, especially when in-person interactions are limited. Meaningful acknowledgment boosts morale, strengthens team bonds, and makes employees feel valued and seen.

Here are three impactful ways to recognize your remote employees:

1. Shoutouts on Slack

Make it a standard practice to celebrate company wins and individual milestones on a Slack channel(or Microsoft Teams, if that’s what you’re using!). It may not sound like much, but getting a shout-out can make employees feel happy and proud of their work.

A bonus tip: personalize your company chat by creating unique company emojis. Whether it’s photos and gifs of team members, the company logo and brand materials, or unique reaction emojis, it’s a low-effort way to engage a remote team.

2. Gifts and swag packages

Celebrate your team with gifts and swag packages at every appropriate opportunity. Start by sending out a welcome package for newly hired team members, as it’s an excellent way to make them feel welcome and part of the team from day 1.

After onboarding, employees should get birthday and work anniversary gifts and cards or gift packages for major holidays they celebrate. It helps improve morale and increase the sense of team belonging with remote employees.

3. Employee recognition programs

In addition to sending gifts and building a culture of team recognition, companies with remote employees should invest in structured employee recognition programs. Recognition programs help People teams track team members’ analytics and data, integrate recognition into their everyday work tools and software, and reward employees.

Fostering in-person connections

Remote workers love flexibility, but 44% say their biggest challenge is connecting with coworkers. One of the ways companies can tackle this challenge and get to keep the best of both worlds is to get together in person.

Face-to-face encounters allow remote teams to connect, brainstorm, and collaborate instead of doing solo work, which they typically do successfully at home.

Here are some ways to facilitate a sense of community in physical spaces.  

1. Company offsites

Organizing a company offsite is an effective way to get all your remote workers together at the same location. Offsites help showcase the company culture and get people to bond personally.  

Bonus tip: Create an "all-hands-on-deck" experience by inviting remote team members to participate in event planning actively. Letting employees shape activities, choose event themes, or coordinate logistics fosters a deeper sense of belonging, increases excitement, and boosts participation—ensuring your offsite delivers meaningful connections and memorable outcomes.

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2. Events and holiday celebrations

Whether it’s an end-of-year holiday party or an event to celebrate a company milestone, gathering remote employees in one place is a good idea to celebrate and have non-work-related conversations and activities.

Even companies whose remote workforces are distributed across the globe can organize events easily. If it’s too complicated to get the whole team in one place, you can organize events in several cities at the same time and combine on-site gatherings with virtual team events in a true hybrid-work fashion.

3. Team meetings and brainstorming sessions

On a more frequent basis, companies can provide remote teams with opportunities to connect in person on their terms. Whether you’re using flexible workspaces or have office hubs for your teams, it can be helpful for employees to have access to a collaborative space when they need one.

Employees who live in the same area can get a chance to meet up and get to know each other better, even if they don't work on the same teams. For companies like Future, getting together a few times a week or month in a workspace nearby helps them solidify work relationships and reinforce the feeling of team belonging.

Organizing team-building activities

When meeting in person isn’t an option, virtual team-building activities are an excellent option to get your distributed team to bond, connect, and get to know each other better. Some ideas you can use are

1. Team social time

Social time is a recurring company-wide (or team-focused, if you’re in a large company) hangout focused on team building, having fun, and getting to meet your team. You can organize these once or twice every month, and activities can vary widely, from live cooking, yoga, and quizzes to scavenger hunts and trivia.

These events are usually hosted on Zoom, but you can use other platforms to amplify your events. Additionally, make sure these events are happening regularly but not in a cadence that overwhelms your team’s calendars.

2. Water cooler-type chats

The one challenge remote employees have when building connections with their teams is the lack of serendipity that often happens in-office — known as the famous “water cooler chats.” Remote leaders have to be intentional about providing these types of connections, but it’s far from impossible to achieve.

For companies with many employees, it’s a good idea to organize events dedicated to personal interests and hobbies, like book clubs, yoga workshops, or sports events. In case this is logistically challenging, virtual coffee chats or once-a-month virtual happy hours can also be a good team bonding solution.

3. One-on-one check-ins

When working in a remote team, employees can find themselves mainly communicating with groups of coworkers and needing more personal one-on-one connections. Therefore, managers and leaders should also facilitate employees to connect and meet one-on-one to increase bonding on personal levels.  

One of the best ways to do that is to ensure every new hire invites all their teammates for a 15-minute intro chat during their first week on the job. It’s an effective way to speed up relationship-building and make the first week on the job more balanced for the new employee.  

Prioritizing work-life balance

Unlike their office-based counterparts, remote employees are more likely to feel symptoms of burnout and isolation and experience the inability to switch off from work, which can easily affect their well-being. Here are some ways remote companies can help their employees improve work-life balance, preserve mental health, and retain positive feelings about their work:  

1. Setting boundaries

Remote work gives employees freedom from long commutes, but this is often compensated with long work hours, endless video calls, and the invisible pressure always to be online and available. As part of their communication tools and guidelines, companies would do well to encourage employees to set boundaries about their work hours and availability and use their PTO.

Managers can further improve initiatives like these if they lead by example; not scheduling meetings outside of core hours and using PTO regularly can go a long way to show employees it’s okay to set boundaries even when working remotely.

2. Perks employees will use (and love)

During the coronavirus pandemic, companies worldwide realized that the traditional perks and benefits offered to office-based employees differ substantially from what their remote employees want. So, to improve employee retention and achieve relationship-building, remote companies are listening to employees’ needs and offering perks employees actually want.

From home office stipends and wellbeing budgets to better parental leave policies and PTO offerings, it’s essential to offer remote workers a wide array of perks they can choose from, as not everyone will benefit from the same offering.  

3. Flexibility as part of company culture  

The single biggest step any company can take to promote the well-being and work-life balance of remote employees is to ensure flexibility stays part of their company culture. This doesn’t mean only location-driven flexibility, which is the prerequisite of remote work, but flexible work hours, too.

Reducing your dependence on real-time video chats and meetings and relying more on async communication lets your employees plan their days better, improve work-life balance, and work on a schedule that fits their life and family duties.

Providing professional development opportunities

Remote workers can often feel disconnected from their peers, managers, and company, especially if they don’t have a clear idea of whether they can grow and develop their professional skills. Communicate any professional development opportunities clearly and encourage employees to use them.  

1. Conferences  

The key to success is creating company events your employees want to attend.

Attending industry conferences is an excellent way for team members to catch up with trends, learn new skills, and network with field experts. After a few years of video conferencing, some people will likely enjoy an in-person event, although virtual conferences offer great programs and lectures as well.

Create a list of conferences relevant to your departments and teams, and let employees know they can attend one (or more!) at the start of the year. You’ll be surprised how many takers you’ll have!

2. Budgets for courses and certifications

Besides conferences, courses and certifications are a great way to engage remote employees in professional growth and development. For example, your marketing team might want to strengthen their knowledge with an expert-hosted course, and People team members will likely want that SHRM certification.

Come up with budgets per person or department and let employees know they can use them to get certified, attend a course, or even purchase educational materials to help them grow and expand their skills within their remote work environment.  

3. Company training and learning

Finally, if you have the capacity, provide some learning and training programs for employees as a company. These programs don’t always need to be strictly related to a field of expertise — companies can offer training to tackle the challenges of remote work and adapt to this new work environment. For most employees who haven’t worked remotely before, training like this can improve their performance and confidence in a new workplace.  

Remote teams can have strong connections

Remote employees can be strongly connected to their work, company mission, and teammates — but they need to experience being part of a community to achieve that. Companies can produce highly engaged, connected, and happy remote employees by providing a holistic approach to how they communicate, collaborate, and meet and bond.

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