Lob Company Culture & Values

What is the biggest challenge to establishing a virtual-first company culture? 

Maintaining team connectivity and cohesion across time zones. While valuable, digital interactions can lack the spontaneity of face-to-face connections, affecting how quickly we collaborate and bond as a team. 

We tackle these challenges with solutions aimed at boosting productivity and fostering collaboration while meeting the diverse needs of our workforce. We offer coworking spaces through Deskpass and a home-office stipend to ensure everyone has a workspace that suits their needs. Our Notion hub centralizes distributed work resources and holds our community agreements, which outline our commitments and expectations, helping us to balance work and personal lives while staying responsive and accountable.

We also champion asynchronous work and launched an asynchronous work training to promote flexibility and enable productivity and collaboration. Plus, Lob offers a stipend for local, in-person gatherings to encourage genuine connections, supported by regional community ambassadors who organize local events.

What’s your number one tip for fostering connection and/or collaboration among virtual teams?

Make it a core part of your organization’s culture and a key responsibility for managers. 

Community building requires active participation, and managers set the tone. Find ways to bond on a genuine level — keep cameras on during meetings, get to know team members as individuals, ask about their personal lives and hobbies and dedicate team time to connecting beyond work obligations. 

Community and connection needs to be a top priority in a virtual environment. A strong sense of community boosts trust, making it easier to share feedback and collaborate naturally. Problems get solved more effectively, and the team is engaged, driven by a collective motivation to succeed. When employees trust and support each other, you get a cohesive and productive team that is invested in each other’s success and will go the extra mile to achieve shared goals. You create an environment where employees enjoy working together, where they can show up as their authentic, best selves every day, and that is an environment where employees want to be for the long haul.

What remote working tools do you lean on to reinforce culture?

We use Notion to house all our resources, making it easy for employees to self-source information and enhance productivity. We also use Slack very heavily.