Voices in Leadership • 7 MIN READ
Five Years of Remote Work: What It Taught Me About Culture
JUN 5, 2026
A people leader reflects on what the past five years of distributed work have permanently changed in how she thinks about organisational culture.
Culture is not the office
The most important thing I learned is that culture is not located in a building. Before the pandemic, I would have told you that in-person time was essential for culture: the informal conversations, the shared experiences, the physical proximity that builds trust. I was partially right about the mechanism but completely wrong about the conclusion. Culture is not created by being in the same room; it is created by shared values, consistent behaviour, and repeated interactions. Those can happen in any medium, if you design for them intentionally.
What we had to replace deliberately
When we went remote, we lost a great deal of informal connection that had previously happened by accident: the conversations at the coffee machine, the lunch where someone shared something personal, the observation of a colleague handling a difficult situation with grace. In a physical office, these happen without any organisational effort. Remotely, you have to replace them with deliberate design: structured social time, peer mentoring, manager check-ins with a genuine wellbeing question, virtual team rituals. The organisations that struggled with remote culture were the ones that waited for it to happen naturally.
The irreversible changes
Three things have permanently changed in how I lead. First, I now design every process for asynchronous participation by default, not synchronous participation with remote access bolted on. Second, I write far more than I used to: culture in a distributed organisation lives in written communication, and the quality of that writing shapes the quality of the culture. Third, I take proximity bias far more seriously than I ever did, because I have seen its effect on performance ratings, promotions, and opportunity allocation when some colleagues are always physically present and others are not.
