We pride ourselves on having a strong company culture, and a close-knit community of employees. Riipen has a very flat hierarchy, where any employee can (or should) feel comfortable speaking to any other. Riipen-eers generally feel very closely connected to the company's mission, and are very motivated and willing to go above and beyond to achieve it: "Empowering emerging talent to gain relevant skills and find jobs they love."

That said, our retention of employees who work remotely has been much less strong than that of employees who work primarily out of an office. The remote employees who stay with Riipen are less likely to participate in company events, sometimes less likely to put their hand up for special projects, and have reported feeling disconnected from day to day operations and company culture. The exception to this is our tech team - they are all located in different cities, and work together remotely extremely well, with strong retention rates, but are somewhat less engaged with the rest of the company than within their own team.

This extends even to when people are traveling for work or working from home - they report feeling "out of the loop" even when away for short periods.

Our primary mode of internal communication is Slack, and there are both company-wide channels (#riipenstuff, #peopleandculture, #deployments and many more) and team-specific ones. Company events tend to focus on the experience of the Vancouver office (eg. bringing in cake once a month for the birthdays of the month, going out for drinks on a Friday, etc). For internal meetings that involve remote workers, we usually meet over videoconference. Sound issues and connectivity problems sometimes get in the way of this.

In Slack, we have a tool called Coffee Buddies which randomly pairs two employees (located anywhere) to meet in person or virtually to catch up every week. Every week you're assigned a different "buddy." Some employees do a great job keeping up with these, but others find the weekly commitment too much and tend to miss them.

Since the Vancouver office makes up the large majority of our employees, we suspect the strong intra-office culture here can feel exclusionary. We want remote employees to feel equally valued and equally a part of Riipen.

Our goals for the project would be to have tangible suggestions on changes we could make in our day-to-day operations to improve collaboration between employees in different locations, and to improve the job satisfaction of remote employees.

We would love to gain insight into these questions:

• Why do remote employees feel disconnected from company culture?
• How can we improve retention of our remote employees?
• How can we improve collaboration between employees located in different places?

Long term our goal is that an employee working from any location has a similar experience with Riipen, experiences a high degree of job satisfaction, feels connected to the company mission and culture, and never leaves. (Mostly kidding about that last part.)