The ability to hire remote talent across borders has unlocked superpowers for distributed organizations—greater access to talent, more diverse teams, round-the-clock operations, and cost-conscious growth.
However, remote teams also face challenges when it comes to company culture and employee experience. When your team is working remotely across borders and time zones, it can be challenging to maintain a consistent employee experience and a cohesive company culture. How do you ensure an equivalent, high-quality experience for team members regardless of location? How do you ensure authentic connection and employee-centricity in a distributed organization?
For People teams at distributed companies, maintaining consistency and cohesion are foundational for keeping employees engaged and productive. Otherwise, you risk losing people to disengagement, burnout, or turnover.
I’ve seen firsthand what it takes to thrive in a remote work environment since the team I lead as the Director of People Services at Oyster spans 10 countries. So, if you’re leading a distributed workforce, here are the practical strategies I recommend to ensure an excellent remote employee experience across time zones.
1. Ensure a smooth onboarding
When starting a remote role, it’s easy for a new hire to feel lost, especially if they’re in a different time zone from their manager or most of their team. This is why it’s crucial to build a robust onboarding experience to help them feel connected and get up to speed.
- Create an onboarding checklist that the new joiner can work through async. Provide step-by-step guidance about the documentation or training they need to complete, where to find essential information or processes, and who their key points of contact are. You can build your onboarding workflow in your HRIS, or you can use Notion or Google Docs. Pro tip: Design two onboarding structures running in tandem: one focused on the organization, and the other on the role and department. This helps them understand how their own work connects and aligns with the overall company strategy.
- Set up introductory meetings with their manager, teammates, and key cross-functional colleagues. Having these calls booked in their calendar ahead of time helps the new team member start to build relationships and gain context for future collaboration. Use tools like Calendly and Clockwise to simplify booking meetings across time zones.
- Use onboarding cohorts to foster camaraderie and assign onboarding buddies to welcome and support new joiners. An onboarding cohort creates a shared experience where new employees can bond as they adjust to a new workplace, and a buddy can act as a friendly point of contact who checks in with them regularly and answers any questions they might have.
2. Equip your team with the right tools and setup
In a remote workplace, having the right setup in place is absolutely necessary so that people can work asynchronously without puzzling over where to find information or waiting for people to point them in the right direction. A well-designed remote workplace should enable people to work productively without wasting time or feeling lost.
- Clarify tools and processes for communication, collaboration, project management, and more. For example, you might use Slack for messaging and discussions, Asana for project management, Notion for documentation, Miro for collaboration, and so on.
- Provide training and enablement to equip employees with remote work skills. Record demo videos or run training on best practices to work effectively in a distributed workplace. Leverage tools like Loom to provide async training content that people can consume in their own time.
- Ensure clear and thorough documentation that’s accessible to everyone at any time and acts as a single source of truth. Make sure people know where to find the information they need, and review periodically to make sure your documentation is accurate and up to date.
3. Reinforce company culture and connection
While remote work is beneficial in terms of flexibility and work-life balance, it also has the potential to feel isolating since you can’t grab coffee with a colleague or bump into people in the hallway. For this reason, distributed organizations need to intentionally design for culture and connection.
- Build and reinforce a unified culture through virtual events, team offsites, and more. These events should promote the company core values and nurture a sense of shared purpose as an organization. Design events and experiences that inspire and motivate people, so that they feel connected to their colleagues as well as the organization’s mission and vision.
- Create opportunities for social connection like virtual coffee chats, games, quizzes, and more. Managers should set the tone that social time is work time, so that catching up with colleagues is both encouraged and expected.
- Recognize employees and celebrate wins so that employees feel that their work is appreciated. This can range from thanking a team member in a meeting for a job well done to more formal or structured employee recognition programs involving perks or prizes.
4. Offer remote-friendly benefits
With distributed teams, benefits packages need to be tailored to support remote work. It can be challenging to offer benefits that work for everyone in every region since statutory requirements and employee expectations vary considerably across countries. But it’s essential to make sure you’re offering benefits that enhance the remote employee experience while also meeting local requirements.
- Provide a remote work stipend to help with purchasing the equipment needed for a comfortable home office setup, such as an external monitor, an ergonomic keyboard, a high-speed internet connection, and more. You can provide this stipend as an initial lump sum or as an ongoing monthly benefit.
- Create localized benefits packages to meet country-specific requirements and expectations. Some countries might require a remote work stipend, while others might mandate meal vouchers. Work with local partners to understand local norms and expectations, so you can design a benefits package that’s fair, compliant, and competitive.
- Offer flexible benefits so employees can choose what’s most meaningful for them, whether it’s a gym membership or a meditation app. Since benefits packages are difficult to standardize across regions, offering flexible perks is a way to create a shared experience through platforms like Juno and ThanksBen.
5. Focus on employee health and well-being
Since remote work is often performed at home, it can sometimes blur the boundaries between people’s personal and professional lives. If you’re at the end of your workday, but colleagues in other time zones are just coming online, it can be tempting to keep working beyond normal hours, but this will only lead to overwork and burnout. Distributed organizations should focus on employee health and well-being to ensure that remote employees are working in a healthy and sustainable way.
- Promote healthy remote work habits like setting clear boundaries around working hours. Make sure employees know that logging off at the end of the day is expected and encouraged. Lean into async practices so that people don’t feel like they need to answer emails or join live meetings outside of their normal working hours.
- Watch for burnout and make sure your benefits package includes mental health support. Encourage managers to check in on their team members regularly, promote healthy boundaries, and recalibrate workloads as needed.
Build a thriving global team with Oyster
People teams at distributed organizations already have their hands full building a strong culture and a consistent employee experience for their remote workforce. You shouldn’t have to also handle the tedious admin and logistics of cross-border employment.
That’s where the right partner can help. As a global employment platform, Oyster helps you onboard talent in 180+ countries around the world. We take care of the full employee journey. This means we handle all the employment essentials—onboarding, payroll, benefits, compliance, and more—so you're free to focus on leading your team. Oyster’s user-friendly platform and reliable customer support helps you build a distributed team and deliver an exceptional remote employee experience.
Reach out today to learn how Oyster’s employer of record (EOR) service can be a strategic partner in achieving your global expansion goals.
About Oyster
Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, engage, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.
Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world—with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.
