Voces en Liderazgo • 7 MIN LEER
Five Years of Remote Work: What It Taught Me About Culture
JUN 5, 2026
Una líder de personas reflexiona sobre lo que los últimos cinco años de trabajo distribuido cambiaron permanentemente en la forma en que piensa sobre la cultura organizacional.
La cultura no es la oficina
Lo más importante que aprendí es que la cultura no está ubicada en un edificio. Antes de la pandemia, les habría dicho que el tiempo presencial era esencial para la cultura: las conversaciones informales, las experiencias compartidas, la proximidad física que construye confianza. Tenía parcialmente razón sobre el mecanismo, pero estaba completamente equivocada sobre la conclusión. La cultura no se crea estando en la misma habitación; se crea con valores compartidos, comportamiento consistente e interacciones repetidas. Eso puede suceder en cualquier medio, si lo diseñan intencionalmente.
Lo que tuvimos que reemplazar deliberadamente
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.
Los cambios irreversibles
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.
