How do you create a sense of belonging when your org is all remote?

One of the reasons why we've been able to make remote working successful with COVID is because we built these relationships before. Once we were remote we just continued building on those connections. It worked because we know how to find each other. You have to figure out when to get together with each other. I think you can still make it work if you create those opportunities, even if you've always been remote.

It's a lot easier for us to create a sense of belonging for employees. But with the contractors or flexible workers, we find it's a lot harder to develop that. We used to just have employees in our all-hands meetings, and now we've expanded that out to include hourly contractors and flexible employees. We build that sense of belonging by having town halls that involve everyone. We use the Zoom breakout rooms and we have conversations that are not just about work; sometimes they’re about what's going on in the world.

Everyone's starting to get used to seeing each other virtually. I think we're finally doing a good job of getting everyone together as much as possible, so they feel like they're developing these relationships. You can't do all-hands meetings with 200 people in the same group and expect there to be collaboration. It just doesn't work. But having those breakout sessions virtually and getting those much smaller groups of people together really helps establish relationships.