Someone on your team just handed in their two weeks' notice. They did good work, showed up reliably, and never caused problems. Now they're gone, and you’re wondering how you could’ve kept them engaged.
U.S. employee engagement dropped to a 10-year low in 2024, with only 34% of workers engaged at work. Even more discouraging: remote employees’ sense of connection to their company’s mission reached an all-time low.
The good news about remote team culture, however, is that it’s flexible and ever-changing. You don’t need a huge budget, company offsite, or another lame ‘virtual happy hour’ to improve it. Start with these nine, specific and practical ways to enhance remote team culture, even if you don’t have a virtual office on Gather yet.
First, a quick definition: Remote team culture is the shared values, habits, and sense of belonging that influence how a distributed team works and connects. It's not the values slide in your onboarding deck; it's what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon when no one's watching.
9 Ways to Improve Remote Team Culture
Define your culture before you try to fix it
Make focused work actually possible
Replace transactional meetings with real connections
Create space for casual, unscheduled interaction
Build in real recognition (not just #kudos channels)
Invest in learning together
Improve how you collaborate — not just how often
Close the feedback loop
Give your remote team a place they actually want to be
1. Define Your Culture Before You Try to Fix It
You can't improve what you haven't named.
Before you add new rituals, tools, or team events, take five minutes and ask your team a single question: "In three words, how would you describe our culture?"
You can ask it in a Lattice survey, a Slack poll, a quick Google Form, whatever. The method doesn't matter. The important part is that you ask everyone: new hires, leadership, people who've been around for years. Try to get a full picture, un-biased by role or seniority.
Junior employees and executives often describe the same organization in completely different terms. Once you know where you actually are, it's a lot easier to see where you need to go.
2. Make Focused Work Actually Possible
When people can't get into a flow state, they feel frustrated and disconnected. Not because the team is bad, but because the environment is.
Before you add anything to your team's plate, audit what's already on it:
Meetings: Don’t let your team suffer from Zoom fatigue. Protect at least two to three hours per day (or one full day per week) for heads-down work. Announce it, put it on the calendar, and honor it yourself.
Messages: Encourage async norms like Slack threads, Loom updates, and shared docs before scheduling a meeting. Not every update needs a call.
Expectations: Remove the pressure to respond to everything right away. Define what urgent actually looks like and what can wait until tomorrow.
Make these decisions with your team so you’re all on the same page about how you want to work together. This will help everyone balance their time and actually have the chance to focus.
3. Replace Transactional Meetings With Real Connection
When every interaction is an agenda topic, a Zoom link, and a calendar invite, it strips the spontaneous human element out of it. The feeling.
A few things worth auditing:
Which meetings are actually necessary? Ask your team directly. You'll likely find two or three recurring calls that could be a shared doc or a Slack thread.
Replace 30-minute defaults with quick touchpoints. A brief written standup or a short Loom video can replace a lot of "just checking in" meetings. In Gather, pop by someone’s desk for a 5-minute chat instead of scheduling an entire meeting.
Reserve synchronous time for what actually benefits from it: brainstorms, hard conversations, creative collaboration, and celebrations.
In a Gather virtual office, you can have a 5-minute conversation the same way you would in person: walk over to someone's desk, ask a quick question, go back to work. No calendar invite required. That changes the feeling of a workday considerably. (More on this in tip #9.)
"Gather has helped our team culture in a massive way since we all work remotely, but it feels like we're in one office, one headspace. We're a lot more connected to each other this way, and the amount of meetings has gone down."
Kayla Goosen, Marketing Manager at mutherboard
4. Create Space for Casual, Unscheduled Interactions
In-person offices have accidental culture: hallway conversations, someone's birthday cake in the kitchen, the ten-minute debrief that happens after a meeting ends and people are still hanging around. Remote teams don't have any of that by default. You have to build it intentionally.
A few things that work:
Oddly specific social channels. Create channels like #what-are-you-reading, #desk-setups, #weekend-wins. The topic makes it easy for people to participate and actually post.
Optional async rituals. A weekly prompt (Monday motivation, Friday photo share, a rotating "show us your workspace" thread) gives people an easy way to share without requiring everyone to be online at the same time.
Virtual social events that don't feel like another meeting. The best ones are opt-in, time-limited, and actually fun; not a Zoom happy hour where everyone stares at each other.
This is where Gather shines: A virtual office gives your team a dedicated place to be silly and social. You can dance, ride go karts, play board games, and decorate the space for holidays or celebrations. Your team's avatars, emotes, and objects create a layer of personality that's very hard to replicate in Slack or Zoom. Culture shows up in those small moments.
"Gather makes you find moments of fun. It’s elevated our game in terms of keeping the team connected, even if you’re not in the same place."
Clara Daray, Co-Founder, Pegasus Content
Members of the Pegasus team dancing in a conga line in their virtual office on Gather.
5. Build In Real Recognition (Not Just a #Kudos Channel)
Recognition is one of the highest-leverage levers for remote culture, and one of the most consistently underused. Gallup found that globally, only one in four employees strongly agree they received meaningful recognition within the last week. Employees who feel unrecognized are twice as likely to say they'll quit within the next year.
The problem is that meaningful recognition is difficult when you’re not physically in the same room. (A virtual ‘Congrats!’ doesn’t feel as nice as surprise donuts in the morning.)
A few approaches that actually work:
Celebrate publicly. Don't hide wins in DMs. Share them where the whole team can see.
Make it a standing agenda item. A 5-minute "shoutout" slot in your weekly all-hands or team meeting is easy to implement and hard to skip once it's expected.
Encourage peer-to-peer, not just top-down. Tools like HeyTaco in Slack let teammates give each other props in real time. The peer recognition tends to feel more meaningful than a manager's praise, too.
Research from Vantage Circle found that recognized employees are 45% less likely to leave within two years. That's not a soft culture outcome — that's a retention strategy.
6. Invest in Learning Together
When people feel like they're growing, they feel more connected to the organization and to each other.
A few ideas that work for remote teams:
Lunch-and-learns and internal workshops. Ask someone on your team to teach something they know well. It surfaces hidden expertise and gives the teacher a moment to shine.
Cross-team skill shares. Invite someone from product to walk the marketing team through their roadmap process, or ask engineering to explain how they do code reviews. It breaks down silos and builds relationships.
Cover the cost of a course or conference — and discuss it as a team afterward. Don’t just fund it learning; talk about it. The discussion afterward is the part that connects people and improves culture.
The key is making learning a shared experience, not a solo activity that someone does and then quietly adds to their LinkedIn.
Example of a virtual meeting on Gather.
7. Improve How You Collaborate, Not Just How Often
There's a version of remote collaboration that's actually just parallel working with a lot of Slack noise. People are technically "collaborating” via back-and-forth messages, but it doesn’t really feel like you’re building something together.
Collaboration quality matters more than collaboration frequency. A few things that actually shift it:
Cross-team projects. Deliberately connect people who don't normally work together. The relationship that forms from a two-week sprint often outlasts the project itself.
Shared async brainstorms. Tools like Miro or a whiteboard in Gather let teams think together without needing to be on the same call. Drop ideas in, build on them over a day, come to the sync already warmed up.
Clear ownership, shared context. Good collaboration requires both. If everyone's responsible, no one is. Assign owners, but make sure the whole team understands why the work matters.
"We needed a space that felt more natural. That's when we switched to Gather as our virtual office. Now, dropping by a teammate's desk takes seconds. Ideas flow without the friction of scheduling meetings. Feedback happens in real time, just like in a physical office. The result? Faster iteration cycles. Higher-quality design work. A stronger, more connected team."
Siddharth Vij, Co-Founder at Bricx
8. Close the Feedback Loop
Culture doesn't improve in a vacuum. You need honest input, and honest input only comes when people trust that their answers will actually lead to something. Pulse surveys that show no visible change do more harm than no surveys at all.
Here's a simple framework that works:
Ask regularly, lightly. Monthly or quarterly pulse surveys (3–5 questions max) surface trends before they become crises. Lattice and Officevibe by Workleap both do this well.
Share results with the team, not just leadership. Transparency builds trust. Even if the results are uncomfortable, people feel respected when they're included in the conversation.
Act on at least one thing from every cycle, and share it. "You told us X, so we did Y" is one of the most powerful sentences a manager can say.
And circle back to where we started: share the three-word culture question with your team again in a few months. If the words have shifted from things like "siloed" to "connected" or "chaotic" to "focused," you'll know something is working.
9. Give Your Remote Team a Place They Actually Want to Be
Every tip on this list can be done without a virtual office. But there's something this last one addresses that nothing else quite can: the feeling of working together, not just working.
Remote work has a lot going for it: flexibility, focus time, no commute. What it doesn't naturally give you is the ambient sense of being around your team: seeing who's at their desk, catching someone between tasks for a quick question, having a conversation that wasn't on anyone's calendar. Those moments are where culture gets built, and they're hard to manufacture through Slack channels and scheduled video calls.
That's what a virtual office on Gather brings back. It gives remote teams the best qualities of both worlds: the flexibility and focus of remote work, plus the spontaneous connection and ambient presence of a shared physical space.
Your team can see each other's avatars. They can walk over, use spatial audio to jump into a conversation, react with emotes, and go back to their desk in five minutes — without a meeting link or a calendar block.
"Introducing Gather's virtual workspace has been a game-changer for how we connect and collaborate day to day. It's more than a virtual office. It's where conversations happen naturally, collaboration feels easy, and culture shows up in the small moments."
Natalie Karr, Director of Marketing
Getting started with Gather takes only a few minutes to create your office. The 30-day free trial gives you a whole month to test it with your team, and if you need anything at all, we're here to help.
Start With One Question
Improving remote team culture isn't a one-time initiative. It's a set of intentional habits — and the good news is that even small changes compound quickly when people feel seen, connected, and like they belong somewhere.
Start simple: ask your team to describe your culture in three words this week. Once you know where you’re starting, the path forward gets clearer.
And if you want to give your remote team a place to call their own, one where they can work, have fun, and celebrate together, that’s exactly what Gather virtual offices are built for. Start your 30-day free trial.
