How to Build a Strong Culture in Remote and Hybrid Teams by Gustavo Razzetti
Gustavo Razzetti is the CEO & founder of Fearless Culture, a workplace culture consultancy that helps teams and organisations lead and innovate from a place of courage. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Psychology Today, and Forbes, among others. In this interview, we talk to Gustavo about the brand new How to Build a Strong Culture in Remote and Hybrid Teams Toolbox.
What’s your toolbox all about? Why does it exist? What problems is it aiming to help solve?
“How do you build and sustain culture in a remote environment?” or “How can I keep my culture alive if people are in office only a few days?” are questions I hear often at Fearless Culture. Both CEOs and team leaders reach out, worried that the culture will suffer because of the hybrid workplace revolution.
That’s why I decided to put together a toolbox with 15 tools to help build culture remotely.
I wanted to address the most common challenges such as: hiring and onboarding new employees, overcoming cultural barriers, dealing with communication issues, keeping the culture alive, balancing freedom and performance, adopting asynchronous-first collaboration, and promoting psychological safety in a remote environment.
This toolkit goes beyond the usual bonding and team-building activities, focusing on areas that create a more profound, long-term impact.
Who developed it? What was the team that you put together?
The toolkit was curated by me. It includes methods developed by Fearless Culture, as well as by other experts and organisations: Pia-Maria Thorén, Stonehill College, Manal Sayid, Miro, Microsoft, Signify Health, Buffer, GitLab, and Twist.
How do you practically use the toolbox in your work? And how do others use it?
We receive regular requests from organisations wanting to keep their culture alive and strong, as I mentioned. The first thing that we ask is: what part of the culture do they want to improve? Culture is such a broad term, so we need to know if they’re talking about team rituals, improving remote collaboration/ communication, increasing psychological safety or feedback, etc.
Based on this specific need, we then select the activities from the toolbox that will work best for them.
What do you think is next for the toolbox? Do you have plans to update or change it?
We will continue to update the toolkit every month, adding one or new activities each time. We are planning to categorise all the different tools and activities to make it easier for facilitators to find what they need.
For example: psychological safety, communication, increasing belonging, etc.
What’s your opinion on the idea of toolboxes in general? At this point everyone seems to have their own! When are they useful and when are they not?
Toolboxes are becoming increasingly valuable for facilitators. They make it easier to access different methods based on a specific challenge or need. Yes, there’s been a proliferation of toolboxes, making it more important to validate the quality of all available tools — some have very limited real-life application.
In our case, some of the tools we’ve developed — such as The Culture Design Canvas — have been downloaded and been used by more than 150,000 people all over the world. This has provided us with invaluable real-life feedback that allows us continue to improve the tools.
Another important factor is that even though most toolboxes are easy to use, most challenges are unexpected. We’ve received a lot of questions and feedback from facilitators about particular issues they had to solve. That’s why we have put together training programs to help consultants and coaches take those toolkits to the next level.
One more thing: as part of Fearless Culture’s purpose to equip facilitators and change instigators with actionable tools, our resources page has over 50 tools and methods to help design positive workplace cultures.
Thanks to Gustavo Razzetti for the interview. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. Check out ToolboxToolbox.com for more where this came from 🛠
