How to Build Company Culture Remotely 2025 (6-20 Employees)
Your startup has found product-market fit. Revenue is growing, you’re hiring rapidly, everything is working, until suddenly it isn’t. The tight-knit team that moved mountains together now feels fragmented. Decision-making that used to be fast and aligned now requires endless meetings. The “vibe” that made your company special is evaporating, and you can’t quite pinpoint why.
This is what happens when companies scale without learning how to build company culture remotely first. When your team was five people who ate lunch together daily, culture was transmitted through osmosis. Everyone absorbed values, communication norms, and decision-making approaches just by being present. But osmosis doesn’t scale. At 25 people across three time zones, those unspoken norms become invisible, and new hires either invent their own or flounder trying to figure out “how we do things here.”
Most founders realize they need to codify culture only after it’s already diluted or fractured. By then, you’re trying to recapture something that’s already been lost rather than preserving something that still exists. The companies that maintain a strong culture through scaling do something counterintuitive: they codify explicitly and early, even when it feels premature.
Here’s what most founders miss: codifying culture isn’t about writing inspirational posters or corporate mission statements. It’s about making the implicit explicit. This means documenting the decision-making frameworks, communication norms, and behavioral patterns that define how your best team members work, not how you wish they worked.
Why Culture Dies During Scaling
(If You Don’t Build)
Culture in early-stage companies exists primarily as a shared understanding among people who interact constantly. This works brilliantly, until it doesn’t.
WHAT BREAKS DOWN:
Proximity-Based Transmission Fails
When people work remotely or across offices, they can’t absorb culture through observation and daily interaction.
Hiring Velocity Exceeds Cultural Transmission Capacity
When you add three new people to a five-person team, the three can still absorb culture from the five. When you add fifteen people to a twenty-person team, the original twenty can’t transmit culture fast enough.
Implicit Norms Become Invisible
What was “obvious” to early team members isn’t obvious to new hires who weren’t present during formative experiences.
Individual Interpretations Diverge
Without explicit codification, different people interpret “how we do things” differently, creating inconsistency that feels like culture erosion.
Competing Sub-Cultures Emerge
As teams grow, departments develop their own norms that may conflict with the original company culture.
The Right Time to Build: Earlier Than You Think
Most founders wait too long because codifying culture feels premature when your team is small and aligned. But there’s a specific window when codification creates maximum value with minimum overhead:
Too Early (1-5 People)
Culture is still forming. Attempting to codify what doesn’t yet exist creates artificial constraints that may not match how the team works.
Perfect Timing (6-20 People)
Culture is established enough to identify clear patterns, but small enough that the founding team still has direct relationships with everyone. This is your window.
Too Late (20+ People)
The original culture has already been diluted, competing interpretations exist, and you’re trying to recapture rather than preserve.
The Signal To Start
When you make your first hire who won’t have daily direct interaction with founders, it’s time to codify. For remote-first companies, this often means codifying from day one of team growth.
What Needs Codifying
Culture isn’t about inspirational value statements. It’s about specific, observable behaviors and decision-making frameworks that define how work happens.
Decision-Making Frameworks
WHAT TO CODIFY
How do we make decisions? Who has input versus who decides? When do we seek consensus versus move with conviction? How do we disagree productively?
WHY THIS MATTERS
Ambiguity about decision-making creates paralysis as you scale. Explicit frameworks enable faster, more consistent decisions even as team size increases.
EXAMPLE CODIFICATION
“We practice disagree and commit: everyone can voice concerns during discussion, but once a decision is made, everyone commits fully to execution. Decisions are made by the person closest to the problem unless it meets escalation criteria: strategic precedent, budget exceeds $X, or cross-functional impact.”
Communication Norms
WHAT TO CODIFY
How do we communicate across the company? When do we use async versus sync? How do we handle disagreement? What transparency expectations exist? How do we give and receive feedback?
WHY THIS MATTERS
Communication breakdowns are the primary culture killer during scaling. Explicit norms ensure consistency as team size and distribution increase.
EXAMPLE CODIFICATION
“We default to async communication in public channels, reserving meetings for discussions requiring real-time interaction. All significant decisions get documented. We practice radical candor: caring personally while challenging directly. Feedback is given promptly, specifically, and in service of helping people improve.”
Core Values in Behavioral Terms
WHAT TO CODIFY
Not aspirational values, but actual behaviors you want to see repeated. Not “we value innovation” but “we run experiments rapidly, celebrate learning from failures, and default to trying rather than analyzing.”
WHY THIS MATTERS
Vague values don’t guide behavior. Specific behavioral expectations do. New hires need to know what “living our values” looks like day-to-day.
EXAMPLE CODIFICATION
“Ownership mentality means: you act like you own the outcome, you proactively identify and solve problems rather than escalating everything, you communicate early about potential issues, and you improve processes systematically rather than working around them repeatedly.”
Working Norms and Expectations
WHAT TO CODIFY
How do we work? What hours/availability is expected? How do we handle work-life integration? What responsiveness is required? How do we approach meetings, documentation, and collaboration?
WHY THIS MATTERS
Implicit expectations about working norms create confusion and misalignment. Explicit norms ensure consistency while allowing appropriate flexibility.
EXAMPLE CODIFICATION
“We’re async-first and results-oriented: work when you’re most productive, overlap 2-3 hours with your team for collaboration, respond to time-sensitive items within 4 hours during your working day. Document decisions and context so work continues across time zones. Meeting recordings and notes enable participation regardless of schedule.”
How to Build Company Culture Remotely
The process of codification is more important than the output format. Here’s what works:
Start With Observation, Not Aspiration
The Mistake
Writing values you wish your team embodied rather than codifying behaviors your best team members already demonstrate.
Better Approach
Observe your highest-performing team members. What behaviors make them effective? How do they communicate, make decisions, and handle problems? Codify what’s working, not what’s aspirational.
In Practice
Spend time documenting specific examples of “this is exactly how we want people to operate.” These examples become the basis for behavioral codification.
Make It Behavioral and Specific
The Mistake
“We value excellence,” or “we’re customer-focused.”
Better Approach
“Excellence means we ship with appropriate quality for the stage: MVPs should be fast and scrappy, core features should be reliable and polished, and infrastructure should be scalable and maintainable. We match quality investment to business impact.”
The Test
Can a new hire read your culture documentation and know specifically how to behave in common situations? If not, it’s too vague.
Involve the Early Team in Creation
Why This Matters
Culture belongs to the team, not just founders. Early team members have insights about what makes your culture work that founders might miss.
In Practice
Facilitate workshops with early team members to identify and articulate the cultural patterns that make your team effective. Their examples and language often resonate better than founder-written content.
Document Decision Examples
What This Looks Like
Instead of just stating decision-making principles, include specific examples of decisions and how you made them. “When we decided to delay feature X to fix technical debt, here’s how we thought about it…”
Why This Works
New hires learn decision-making frameworks much faster from examples than from abstract principles.
Create Living Documents, Not Static Manifestos
The Mistake
Writing culture documents once and treating them as unchangeable.
Better Approach
Culture documentation should evolve as your company grows and learns. Regular review and updates ensure codification stays relevant.
In Practice
Quarterly culture documentation reviews where team members propose updates based on what’s working and what needs adjustment.
Signs You Need to Codify Culture Now
- New hires frequently ask, “How should I handle this?” for situations that feel obvious to the early team.
- Different team members handle similar situations differently
- Hiring conversations include lots of “you’ll just need to figure out our culture.”
- You find yourself repeatedly explaining, “This is how we do things.”
- Team cohesion feels weaker as you’ve grown.
- Different departments are developing incompatible norms.
Common Codification Mistakes to Avoid
Confusing Values With Culture
Values are aspirational; culture is behavioral. Focus on behaviors, not just values.
Making It Too Formal Or Corporate
Culture documentation should sound like your team talks, not like HR boilerplate.
Writing For External Audiences Instead Of Internal
Culture documentation is primarily for hiring and onboarding, not for marketing. Optimize for clarity and usefulness, not impression management.
Creating Documents Nobody Reads
If culture documentation isn’t actively used in hiring, onboarding, and decision-making, it’s performative rather than functional.
Codifying Without Ongoing Reinforcement
Written culture means nothing if behavior isn’t held accountable to it. Leaders must model and reinforce codified culture consistently.
Using Codified Culture Strategically
Once culture is codified, it becomes a strategic tool:
In Hiring
Screen candidates against specific behavioral expectations rather than vague “culture fit.” Ask for examples demonstrating codified behaviors.
In Onboarding
New hires can learn your culture explicitly rather than absorbing it through prolonged osmosis. This accelerates integration dramatically.
In Performance Management
Codified culture provides clear expectations against which to evaluate behavior and provide feedback.
In Decision-Making
When facing ambiguous situations, teams can reference codified decision-making frameworks to move forward consistently.
In Scaling
As you open new offices or remote hubs, codified culture ensures consistency across geographic distribution.
The Bottom Line
A culture that exists only as a shared understanding among people who interact daily can’t survive scaling. What worked for your five-person team won’t work for your fifty-person distributed organization without explicit codification.
The founders who maintain a strong culture through scaling do something that feels premature: they codify explicitly while their team is still small enough to have a shared understanding. They make implicit norms explicit, document decision-making frameworks, and create behavioral expectations before the original culture is diluted.
Waiting until culture problems emerge means trying to recapture something that’s already been lost. Codifying proactively means preserving something that still exists and using it as a foundation for scaling.
Your culture is either codified intentionally or it will fragment unintentionally. There’s no third option once you start scaling.
Build Culture That Scales
At Anywhere Talent, we help founders build remote-first teams where culture must be codified from the beginning because osmosis doesn’t work across distributed teams. Through our experience placing hundreds of EAs globally, we’ve learned what cultural codification works for scaling companies.
Let’s help you preserve what makes your culture special before scaling dilutes it.
