The most common criticism of remote work is that culture does not survive distance. I have been working remotely for a while, and I once led a marketing team that was entirely remote, each person in a different city. It was a close team. It still is.
A good part of that came from a meeting most managers would cut: the daily with no agenda.
How the rituals fit together
The week had four rituals, and each one did a different job. The first was the daily between sales and marketing, where the sales team told us what had happened with the leads that came in the day before. Right after it came the marketing daily, just the team, where we decided what to do with what we had just heard: how to fix what sales had brought, or what the next step was.
Then the conversation kept going. The designer weighed in on paid media. The developer weighed in on copy. We traded ideas that sounded odd until one of them turned useful. Some days the subject was the number. Other days it was just conversation.
And that conversation is where the culture gets built.
The one-on-ones happened on a fixed cadence, always, and that was the space to develop each person. The weekly results meeting with leadership was mine alone: the team did not sit in it, so the number lived with me and the daily stayed free of it.
Why keep a meeting with no agenda
A meeting with no agenda is usually considered waste, and a daily, every day, on a remote team can look like control. I understand both objections. Marketing, though, is collaborative work. On a small team, what one person does completes what the next one does, and the team needs cohesion to move. The daily was where that cohesion was made, fifteen minutes at a time.
For a founder who runs a regional company and feels the pull toward having everyone in the same room, the question underneath is how to follow, and give culture to, a marketing team that is somewhere else. My answer is design. In an office, the hallway conversation happens by accident. Remote, it only happens if someone schedules it. I would even say a remote team can be closer than an in-office one, because nothing about its closeness is left to luck.
Most of that team is still close today. Some of them still call me for advice. I count that as a result, the same way I count the numbers.