Lots of small businesses don’t have their entire team in one area. Sometimes the perfect person for a job doesn’t live in your state, and sometimes relocating is unnecessary. Instead, they telecommute, and do their job from abroad just as well as they would do it from the cubicle next door. It saves tons of money, too. Still, it’s important you develop the sense of friendship and community that a normal office would have. Here are a few ways to do so.

Call and Skype Your Employees

Get to know your employees. Since that can be hard to do over text alone, call them up and have a conversation with them over the phone. With the world of technology, you may think that face-to-face contact – or even voice-to-voice contact – is completely unnecessary. But this is simply not true, especially with a remote team. What you lose in face-to-face contact can only be regained by developing the relationship with an employee that you would have if you were, indeed, face-to-face. In most situations, a call is sufficient – one of the benefits of working from home is that if you want to lounge in a bathrobe all day, you can. Let them have that privilege unless absolutely necessary.

Think of Your Office Space in a Virtual Way

An office’s culture does not stop at walls. An office’s culture extends to the people who work there, even when they aren’t actually there. Your office can be more like a country. Does a country have physical boundaries? Not usually. So how can you make your virtual office space more like a nation? One company actually provides stipends to their employees that is meant to be used to buy their favorite beer during online meetings. The employee has to take a picture and show the team, but it’s an enjoyable practice and team building exercise.

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