Remote employees are more engaged than their hybrid and in-office counterparts. That's not a typo. Gallup's 2024 datashows remote workers hit 29% engagement compared to 21% for hybrid and 20% for fully on-site employees. Yet 71% of distributed team members say building and maintaining relationships is their biggest challenge.

This is the paradox of distributed work: your people can thrive in it, but culture doesn't happen by accident anymore.

If you're a People Operations or HR leader wondering how to keep your distributed workforce connected, aligned, and engaged, you're in the right place. This guide breaks down the strategies that actually work for maintaining company culture when your team is spread across cities, time zones, and countries.

Map out your company values

Before diving into tactics, you need foundations. If you haven't already, document your company's mission, vision, and core values. These should be clear and accessible to everyone, from executives and employees to customers and the public.

Company culture is essentially your core values translated into behaviors. This is where you define what gets rewarded, how decisions get made, and whether your leadership style is top-down or collaborative.

This is also the time to audit whether your values still fit a distributed reality. Culture at a 20-person startup where founders set the tone looks different from culture at a 500-person company where every employee contributes to the workplace environment. As companies grow and go distributed, their company core values often need refinement.

Having a clear picture of the organizational culture you want makes everything else easier, from hiring decisions to performance conversations to how you design your workspace strategy.

Weave flexibility into your company's DNA

Here's a stat that should shape every workplace decision you make: 69% of workers would accept a salary decrease to work remotely, up 11% from 2024. And companies that enforce strict return-to-office policies experience 23% longer time to fill vacancies.

Flexibility isn't just a perk anymore. It's a baseline expectation.

But flexibility isn't only about location. It's about listening to your employees' needs and trusting them to choose when and where they're most productive. For People teams, the challenge is weaving flexibility into your organization's DNA rather than treating it as a policy exception.

Whether you're evolving from an office-based company or scaling a remote-first team, location-agnostic hiring will bring challenges. You can level the playing field by giving the same benefits to everyone and actively working to bridge the geography gap.

The team at Rhino started using Gable to ensure employees outside of major metro areas have the same experience as their teammates in big cities. For Rhino, adopting distributed work came with a chance to design a strong remote culture across the company, and they used that chance to the maximum.

If you're building out your hybrid workplace strategy, remember that the goal isn't to replicate office culture online. It's to create something intentionally designed for how your team actually works.

Tailor a unique remote onboarding experience

What's the best way to showcase your work culture to new employees? The onboarding process. In distributed teams, onboarding is even more critical because it's often a new hire's first (and sometimes only) impression of what it feels like to work at your company.

There are many ways to create an engaging experience for new remote employees. Send swag bundles to their homes before they start. Assign them a work buddy for their first few weeks. Schedule virtual coffee chats with teammates across departments. Make sure they have face time with leadership early on.

Memorable and effective onboarding helps companies improve employee retention. Employees often cite poor onboarding as the reason for leaving within their first year. Combined with a strong benefits package, onboarding goes a long way toward showcasing and maintaining a positive company culture in distributed companies.

The key is making new hires feel like part of the team from day one, even if their coworkers are thousands of miles away.

Facilitate collaboration (beyond Slack and Zoom)

Technology is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about collaboration in distributed workplaces. But collaboration is a broader challenge for People teams: how do you ensure your employees are genuinely connected, not just available on the same platforms?

From a culture standpoint, it comes down to giving employees unifiers. These are shared experiences and touchpoints that create a foundation for collaboration beyond core work tasks. Slack channels and Zoom happy hours do an excellent job for team members who never meet in person, but collaboration means something different for those who have the chance to see each other.

When in-person meetings happen in distributed teams, they become more intentional and purposeful. This means enabling employees to connect and collaborate when they want to, without forcing them into endless video calls.

Many successful distributed companies are investing in asynchronous communication practices. Buffer, GitLab, and Zapier have built entire playbooks around async-first work. The pattern is clear: document everything, default to written communication, and reserve synchronous time for conversations that truly need it.

Listen to employee feedback (and act on it)

Taking employee feedback and acting on it is essential for distributed companies. It helps you achieve company goals, retain and engage employees, and provide a better employee experience.

Employee feedback can come in many formats: one-on-one check-ins, engagement surveys, meetings with executives, and company-wide AMA sessions. The format matters less than the consistency.

Another effective approach is implementing an open-door policy where new hires get to chat with executives and department heads during onboarding. This showcases a culture of approachability and signals that employee opinions are genuinely valued.

But here's where most companies fall short: they collect feedback and then do nothing visible with it. If you survey your team, share what you learned and what you're changing as a result. Closing the feedback loop builds trust. Ignoring it destroys it.

Research shows that managers account for up to 70% of the variance in team engagement. That means your managers need to be trained not just to collect feedback, but to respond to it meaningfully.

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Nurture employee engagement intentionally

Employee engagement doesn't happen automatically in distributed environments. Both companies and employees are still learning how to get the best out of this model, and the organizations that succeed share common traits: they focus on fulfilling employee needs, provide benefits people actually use, and make belonging feel effortless.

Most companies are rushing to offer flexibility-centered benefits to compete for talent. But many don't consider whether these benefits match what employees actually need. There's little value in providing coworking memberships that sit unused or planning offsites that feel like obligations rather than opportunities.

When considering your engagement strategy for the distributed workplace, think about benefits employees will want to talk about, share among themselves, and enjoy together.

Companies using Gable give employees transparency and visibility into how they use workspaces. With features like Team View, everyone can see where coworkers are headed on a specific date and join them with a single click. This brings workspaces front and center, encourages connection, and gives People teams real-time data on how their workplace strategy is performing.

Help employees battle burnout and improve work-life balance

The data on burnout is sobering. According to DHR Global's 2025 Workforce Trends Report, 82% of knowledge workers report experiencing burnout, with top drivers being long hours (58%) and overwhelming workloads (35%). At the same time, 88% of those same workers report feeling engaged. This "engaged but exhausted" phenomenon is a warning sign that many companies are running their best people into the ground.

Remote work can contribute to burnout when employees struggle to disconnect, but it can also help prevent it when implemented thoughtfully. 79% of remote professionals report lower stress, and 82% say their mental health is better with flexible work.

The difference comes down to whether your distributed culture supports boundaries or erodes them.

Not every remote employee has ideal working conditions at home. As a People leader, it's up to you to offer different options for how and where people work. Providing access to workspaces outside the home isn't just good for collaboration. It helps employees change their environment, achieve better work-life balance, and set clearer boundaries between work and personal time.

For many employees, spending a couple of days each week working from a coworking space or office makes it easier to disconnect when they get home.

Design intentional in-person experiences

When distributed teams get together, those moments need purpose and intentionality. Unlike in office-based cultures where casual interaction happens naturally, distributed teams need to make every in-person gathering count.

The data backs this up: companies that increased their travel budgets to connect employees have 29% lower turnover than those who reduced their travel spend. And at Gable, we see that 72% of workspace bookings are for team gatherings, not solo work. Employees want to come together. They just need the right opportunities and spaces to do it.

Whether you're organizing team meetings, training sessions, or company offsites, the key is letting your team connect as humans first. Design agendas that aren't strictly work-related. Create space for relationship building. Focus on the connections that will make remote collaboration easier for months afterward.

Apart from providing spaces where people can work, facilitate purposeful encounters that emphasize human connection. These moments become the glue that holds distributed culture together.

Following hybrid work model best practices means treating office time as a feature, not a requirement. Use it for what it's best at: building relationships, aligning on strategy, and creative collaboration.

Empower employees to make decisions about how they work

Distributed work is an exercise in trust. It's also an opportunity for companies to demonstrate that they think about work differently and lead with employee needs first.

The priority for People teams should be empowering employees to decide how they work by giving them real decision-making power and good options to choose from. When employees know they have autonomy and are trusted to make smart choices, People teams can guide workplace strategy while still providing the flexibility employees want.

At Augury, employees know they can use a nearby workspace as often as they like. Depending on their needs, they can work solo, have a collaborative day with their team, or host a meeting. The Workplace team gave employees the power to decide and let them run with it, while still staying on top of budgets, usage, and feedback.

This balance of autonomy and oversight is what separates good distributed cultures from chaotic ones.

Use data to make smarter workplace decisions

This might be the most important point in this entire guide. The single biggest advantage of the distributed workplace for People Operations and HR teams is the ability to run a data-driven workplace.

Everything the traditional office didn't give People teams space for is now possible: gathering employee feedback at scale, capturing new metrics, and identifying employee needs as they evolve. The workplace is now a measurable category of employee experience.

The fastest route to designing the best experience is using data and analyzing what works. Track workspace utilization. Monitor which benefits actually get used. Measure engagement over time, not just once a year. Look at where teams choose to gather and why.

Companies using hybrid work software can see patterns that would be invisible otherwise: which days drive the most collaboration, which spaces go unused, where employees are struggling to connect.

Be ready to act on the data and feedback your employees give you. Double down on what they need and use most. Cut what isn't working. This iterative, evidence-based approach is how distributed cultures get stronger over time.

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