The Remote Work Revolution: Nicole Gill of The Happy Employees On Building Strong Cultures in a Digital World

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

I don’t believe in overcomplicating things or letting emotions drive logic. I want to fix the problem that’s responsible for the emotion. I focus on what’s actionable, changeable, and realistic.

The remote work revolution has transformed how we think about work, but it has also raised important questions about maintaining culture and connection in a virtual world. To explore this important topic, we are interviewing Nicole Gill.

Nicole Gill, Organizational Culture Advisor at The Happy Employees, specializes in leadership coaching, building high performance cultures, and people development. Certified in Organizational Development, Change Management, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming coaching, she is a trusted advisor to C-Suite leaders and recognized for implementing innovative strategies that align people strategy with business goals. She focuses on practical, data-driven solutions that improve engagement, retention, and leadership effectiveness.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

My career path has been shaped by a mix of curiosity, problem solving, and a drive to make work better for people. I’ve always needed to know the “why” behind the “what.” I started in project and resource management where I realized that the biggest challenges weren’t just about processes, they were about people. That fascination with both systems and behavior led me to focus on organizational development, leadership coaching, and building high-performance cultures.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began working with remote or hybrid teams?

One of the most interesting experiences I’ve had with remote teams was scaling a company in a remote environment, without ever meeting most of them in person. It forced me to think about how we onboarded, how we built trust, connection, and how we maintained a strong culture across time zones. Having really, really clear expectations, onboarding, and a documented area of where those norms lived, with leadership demonstrating the culture, created more of that authentic culture than I have seen in office environments.

You are a successful leader in the remote work space. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Pragmatism: I don’t believe in overcomplicating things or letting emotions drive logic. I want to fix the problem that’s responsible for the emotion. I focus on what’s actionable, changeable, and realistic.
2. Curiosity: I’m driven by the need to understand why things/people work the way they do. In every role, in conflict management, or coaching leaders, I ask questions to uncover the root of challenges. Often, it’s a miscommunication and a lack of a shared understanding. More often than not, it’s a lack of time to reflect on processes or behaviors that have become automatic.
3. Intuition: I have a strong sense of when something feels off or when opportunities are being missed. This gut feeling helps me navigate situations quickly and avoid pitfalls, allowing me to address issues before they escalate or seize chances before they slip by.

Let’s now dive into the focus of our interview. When the shift to remote work became widespread, what was the biggest challenge you faced in maintaining a strong workplace culture? How did you address it?

When the shift to remote work became widespread, the biggest challenge I faced in maintaining a strong workplace culture was, ensuring there were clear expectations and effective onboarding. It might seem like common sense, but expectations are often assumed and left unsaid. The reality is, what’s obvious to one person isn’t always obvious to someone else. I learned that it’s crucial to explicitly state the “obvious,” your version of it, especially when you’re working remotely. This clarity helps prevent misunderstandings, fosters alignment, and keeps everyone moving in the same direction.

What are some of the unique challenges that remote or hybrid teams face when it comes to creating a sense of connection and belonging?

Communication: When working remotely, the majority of meetings will be virtual. This is especially challenging when teammates are across regions, cultures, and timezones. It’s common to misunderstand and misinterpret body language, tone, and facial expressions when it’s too early in the morning or late at night for others, when some are more introverted than others, or when communications are sent asynchronously. I encourage people to turn on their cameras, be mindful of cultural differences and norms, and practice active listening. Overcommunicating like sharing a transcript or recap also helps keep everyone aligned and in the loop, especially when people can’t attend meetings.

Connection & Belonging: Working remotely can make team members feel disconnected and isolated, especially if they are used to daily face-to-face interactions and social events such as office lunches, happy hours, and casual conversations around the water cooler. It’s important to establish your company’s values and allow natural micro-cultures to form, and be built by the people.

What tools or technologies have you found most effective in fostering communication, collaboration, and team alignment in a remote setting?

1. Communication Tools: (e.g. Slack, Notion, Google Meet): Tools that support asynchronous communication help a remote workforce feel and stay connected, while boosting team productivity regardless of time zone differences. Hosting project retros, team planning sessions, company-wide meetings, and weekly learning events via video conferencing tools also encourage engagement and team building.
2. Collaborative Tools (e.g. Notion, Miro, G-Suite): To facilitate productivity, choose tools that allow team members to easily create, visualize, organize, edit, brainstorm, store, and share documents.
3. Transcription Tools (e.g. Otter.AI): AI tools that offer unique features, such as language translation support, helps teams align and get the gist of a meeting even if they weren’t able/chose not to attend, or when there are language barriers.
4. Engagement & Feedback Tools (e.g. Pando, The Happy Employees). Aside from pulse surveys and antiquated annual performance reviews, leverage tools that can gather team sentiment in real-time to help leaders address key concerns, offer a place for continuous feedback, and recommend personalized development opportunities. This helps team members progress in their careers and leads to a more engaged, productive, and collaborative workforce.

Regardless of tools or technologies used, clear ways of working aligned with company, manager, team, and client expectations should be established during onboarding and reinforced to be effective.

What role does leadership play in building and sustaining a strong company culture in a remote or hybrid work environment?

Leaders must set overall goals and values and model the culture they want to build. Transparent, open communication cultures with clear expectations of what’s expected at macro/micro levels allows ownership, builds accountability, and reduces the need for micromanagement.

What advice would you give to leaders who are struggling to maintain employee engagement and motivation in a fully remote workforce?

Fostering a culture of transparency, flexibility, and support is key to unlocking a remote team’s full potential and driving real innovation.

1. Transparency. With a fully remote workforce, I’ve found that clear and consistent communication helps teams feel connected, valued, and engaged. Whether announcing an important company policy or celebrating someone’s milestone, it’s recommended that everyone is kept in the loop through a variety of communication channels (e.g. video, emails, to chat) and given the chance to raise concerns in a way that makes them feel comfortable, whether through anonymous feedback surveys or live Q&A virtual sessions.
2. Flexibility. Hiring smart and moving out of the way enables ownership, trust, autonomy. Offering flexible hours, remote work options, and compressed workweeks shows that managers trust their team to get the job done without hovering over them.
3. Support. Providing regular feedback and coaching helps leaders maintain a motivated and engaged team. Every manager should regularly check in with their team to discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and where they need help. As a leader, my role is to help my team grow professionally, and ongoing support helps them feel prioritized and inspires them to excel.

Ok, let’s explore actionable insights. Based on your experience, can you share “5 Strategies to Build a Strong Workplace Culture in a Remote Work Environment”? If you can, please include examples or stories for each.

1. Establish Clear Goals. A strong culture begins with a clear sense of direction. Every team member needs to know the company’s goals and their role in supporting those goals. Leaders need to be honest about what these goals are and make sure they’re clear, specific, and measurable. Goals need to be clearly stated on the company’s website, in every job description, and communicated by the recruitment team. This allows incoming candidates to assess whether the company is a good fit for them and evaluate if the culture will be energizing or draining for them.
2. Communicate Expectations of Working Cultural Norms. It’s essential to communicate expectations of working cultural norms before, during, and after the onboarding process. This includes how people work, what tools and technologies are used, as well as role expectations and how performance is measured. For remote teams, it’s important that this information is easily accessible so it can be self-serve and that managers are trained to support team members and ensure alignment.
3. Ensure Continuous Feedback. Encouraging team members to give regular, constructive, caring feedback to anyone in the company helps build a culture that is open, transparent, and high-performing. This approach not only builds trust and encourages personal and professional growth, it also avoids the surprises that often happen during performance reviews.
4. Empower Ownership. Avoid micromanaging. Clearly communicate expected outcomes and give people the autonomy to drive results. Some worry that remote workers will take advantage and cut corners while offline. But if results, standards, expectations, timelines are clearly defined, team members should be trusted to use their expertise to get things done. Allowing employees to decide where, when, and how they work fosters loyalty and ownership. Employees who feel trusted and valued bring their best selves to work.
5. Foster Authentic Connections. As humans, we all crave connection but there should be options to choose how and when we connect. It’s important not to force these connections especially when working across cultures and timezones. For events or happy hour for example, some people prefer to end their day by connecting with their own family and friends while some prefer bonding with their colleagues.

One way to support remote teams is to create an environment that welcomes different communication channels where people can connect, get updates, and share information in a way that feels authentic to them. Enable camaraderie through interest-based channels where people can propose and set up their
own events.

Another way to spark conversations is by hosting events like “Lunch and Learns” across different teams or sharing profiles of new joiners that showcase their interests. This allows natural micro cultures to emerge authentically, encourages more genuine relationships, and builds a culture that supports new ideas and innovation. It also makes people feel like they’re part of building the company versus belonging in a top-down transactional culture.

How do you address potential feelings of isolation or disconnection that employees may experience in a remote work environment?

Here are some initiatives I’ve found effective in curbing feelings of isolation or disconnection:

1. Career growth & development initiatives. Peer-to-peer & mentorship learning opportunities not only provide upskilling but also builds stronger relationships among teams.
2. Bottom-Up Driven Initiatives & Innovation Spaces: Encourage the organic development of initiatives proposed by the teams on the ground to build an engaged, connected culture.
3. Learning Spaces. Allowing subject matter experts to share out learnings across their project, skill-sets, tech trends, or business learnings helps people grow, be surrounded by others with common interest, and builds community.
4. Listening Strategies & AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”): Have a capability to listen to various parts of the organization through different listening strategies such as surveys, focus groups, and AI sentiment analysis. Addressing employee experience and organizational queries directly also fosters a respected, transparent, and connected culture.
5. Virtual community building events, interest channels, and microcultures. Creating interest-based community channels on Slack for example, encourages employees to form micro-cultures. Hosting virtual social events that people can opt-in such as zoom lunches, foodie events, meditation sessions, and online games also builds a sense of fun and community.

Can you share an example of a remote work initiative, policy, or program that you implemented which had a significant positive impact on your team?

One impactful initiative my team and I implemented at a previous company was an English Training Program that aimed to upskill team members whose primary language is not English and didn’t feel confident in their language skills. Designed to support a globally remote workforce from 40 different countries, the program provided tools to help people gain confidence in communicating more effectively across regions and cultures.

The program resulted in:

• Increased productivity. Gaining confidence in public speaking and presentations led to improved collaboration during team meetings and client interactions.
• Improved teamwork. Employees became more comfortable engaging and working with co-workers from other cultures and countries.
• Upskilling and leadership development. Team members who volunteered to participate as teachers and English mentors not only contributed to the program’s success. They also developed valuable leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills.
• Stronger team bonds. Team members were able to meet and interact with colleagues from other teams and departments, bringing the company closer together.

How do you strike the balance between flexibility (one of the main benefits of remote work) and ensuring accountability and productivity?

Having worked with a globally distributed workforce, I’m a firm believer that productivity is about working smarter, not harder. Flexibility is built on trust. It’s having the confidence that your team has the expertise and maturity to get the job done while managing their own time and responsibilities.

However, flexibility doesn’t mean being hands off. As a leader, I set and reinforce the tone, cadence, and culture for my team. While my role is to empower people to perform at their highest potential, it’s also about ensuring they have the tools, support, coaching, and mentorship they need to succeed without compromising the flexibility that remote work offers.

What trends or innovations in remote work are you most excited about, and how do you see them shaping the future of workplace culture?

I’m excited about using AI-powered HR tools to analyze training effectiveness, track skill development, and predict workforce trends. AI can now help identify gaps, personalize learning paths, and optimize development programs based on real-time data. AI can also forecast workforce trends and optimize future training investments faster and more efficiently.

In your opinion, how does building a strong culture in a remote work environment impact not just employees, but also customers, clients, and the company’s overall performance?

Creating processes and initiatives alone aren’t enough. People teams also need to establish effective listening strategies and continuous feedback loops to actively monitor, analyze, and optimize the culture. Leveraging AI and data-driven tools can help companies gain valuable insights if team members are:

1. Engaged & Empowered: Do they speak positively about leadership, feel comfortable sharing in respectful debates, actively participate in decision-making processes, and freely express thoughts and concerns?
2. Proactive Contributors: Do they take initiative in company activities, consistently deliver high quality work, and demonstrate a willingness to go above and beyond for the company’s success?
3. Champions & Promoters: Are they active champions and advocates for the company, its vision, and its products to new team members, clients, friends and family?

By proactively measuring team sentiment, companies can build a culture where employees not only survive, but thrive, driving success across all areas of the business.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people through better remote work cultures, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Communication & Connection Training. So many issues stem from fundamental miscommunication. People want to be understood, heard, and feel connected. Add in a remote culture, and this type of training/facilitation would be wildly successful.

How can our readers further follow you online?

Follow me on LinkedIn at The Happy Employees. I also invite readers to subscribe to Take It Online, a 20-minute podcast that delivers expert insights and real-world solutions to spark harmony and elevate team performance. We talk about practical tips, inspiring stories, and HR strategies to redefine success in the AI-driven workplace. Tune in to the weekly podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or Podbean.

This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.

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The Remote Work Revolution: Nicole Gill of The Happy Employees On Building Strong Cultures in a… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.