Michael Peachey, VP of User Experience at RingCentral, has spent two decades bridging design and engineering in real-world product organizations. On Reimagining Company Culture, he reflects on what builds genuine connection across globally distributed teams and what quietly destroys it. His perspective is unusually grounded for a leader at a communications software company. He talks about people, not platforms, and the operating habits that hold teams together when geography no longer does.
The lesson that runs through the episode: tools amplify a culture, but they never create one.
Connection Is Not a Tool Problem
Most companies that say they are going hybrid are really arguing about real estate. Michael reframes the conversation as one about decision-making rights, meeting hygiene, and trust. Software helps, but only after the team has agreed how it will work together.
Research backs that interpretation. Gallup's hybrid work indicator found that hybrid workers report higher engagement than fully on-site employees, and teams that set their own hybrid norms together post the strongest engagement scores.
In other words, the highest-performing distributed teams are the ones where managers and members built flexible work norms together, not the ones that received a corporate mandate.
Operating Habits That Build Distributed Trust
Default to written context
Michael's teams keep decisions, owners, and rationale in writing. That practice eliminates the who-said-what-in-which-time-zone problem and lets new joiners catch up without scheduling another meeting.
Reserve synchronous time for relationships
Real-time meetings are best spent on connection and on hard creative work. Status updates and one-way information sharing belong in async channels.
Set boundaries on always-on culture
Hybrid teams often drift into 24-hour availability. Codifying quiet hours, response expectations, and protected focus time protects work-life balance and prevents burnout.
Designing for Belonging at Distance
Belonging does not happen by accident across time zones. Michael's teams use rituals deliberately: birthday acknowledgements, project retrospectives, regional meetups, and the occasional all-hands that doubles as a learning event. Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends report confirms that belonging at work, being seen, supported, and connected to purpose, is one of the strongest predictors of intent to stay.
Companies that do this well also pay attention to who gets heard. Engagement programs that lean on real-time feedback tend to surface friction earlier and resolve it before it becomes attrition.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Distributed teams need a credible way to raise issues that does not depend on running into a manager in the hallway. Anonymous reporting and HR case management are part of the operating fabric of a global organization, not a compliance afterthought.
When Michael talks about trust, this is what he means in practice. The pathways for honest feedback have to exist before anyone needs them.
Why This Conversation Matters Right Now
The HR field has been through three waves in the last few years: an emergency pivot to distributed work, a wave of public commitments around inclusion, and a slow correction as leaders started measuring which of those commitments actually moved retention and engagement. Conversations like this one matter because they sit on the other side of that correction. The question is no longer whether to invest in culture. The question is which culture investments produce durable results, and which ones look impressive in a press release but quietly fade.
That shift puts pressure on people leaders to be specific. Generic advice about belonging or psychological safety does not survive a budget review. The HR teams that are pulling ahead are the ones that connect cultural commitments to operating systems, instrument the resulting work, and report on outcomes in the same business-critical language the CFO uses for revenue. According to SHRM's reporting on retention strategies, the cost of underinvesting in culture shows up directly in voluntary attrition, and the math gets harder every year.
This is also where employee relations operations becomes a more visible part of the modern People organization. Employee relations is no longer a quiet compliance function; it is the data layer that tells leaders whether their stated values are being lived inside the organization, and it is increasingly the place where cultural drift first becomes visible. Companies that treat ER as part of the culture stack, rather than a separate compliance silo, get better signal earlier and can course-correct before retention numbers turn.
A Practical Playbook for HR Leaders
Translating a great podcast conversation into actual change inside your organization takes a stepwise plan, not a rallying cry. The most consistent leaders we work with run a 90-day discovery loop, a 90-day pilot, and a 90-day expansion that together compress what would otherwise be a multi-year cultural shift into a single calendar year. The discipline is not novel; the willingness to follow it through is.
Discovery is mostly listening. That means structured conversations with managers, frontline employees, and recent leavers, paired with quantitative pulls from your HRIS, ATS, and case-management system. The goal is to triangulate the real story of how the company makes decisions, who feels heard, and where opportunity quietly evaporates. Most HR teams find that the data they already have, surfaced honestly, points to two or three high-impact interventions they had not previously prioritized.
Pilots are deliberately small. Pick one team, one geography, or one stage of the employee journey and instrument it well. Set a clear hypothesis, a measurable target, and a review cadence shorter than a quarter. The teams that pilot this way produce stories the rest of the organization actually wants to copy. The teams that announce company-wide programs without piloting almost always lose momentum somewhere around month four.
Expansion is the patient work. The organizations that scale change well treat the pilot lessons as the operating manual and resist the urge to rebrand the work. Manager training, listening infrastructure, and case-management discipline travel with the program; without those layers, even successful pilots fail to take root in the rest of the company. The leaders who invest in the unglamorous machinery alongside the visible programs are the ones whose work survives the next reorganization.
The throughline across every successful version of this playbook is the same: change is treated as a system, not a moment. Hiring, performance, recognition, manager development, and reporting infrastructure all have to move together for the new culture to take root. The companies that try to redesign one piece in isolation usually find that the surrounding systems quietly pull the program back to baseline within a year. The companies that move the whole stack at once, even imperfectly, usually compound their gains for the next several years.
One last note for HR leaders worried about whether the moment is right to invest. The cost of waiting always looks smaller than the cost of acting until the data comes in, and by then the talent has already left. Companies that delayed manager training a few years ago ended up paying multiples of that price as their first-line leaders left and took institutional knowledge with them. The teams that invested early are the ones now writing case studies. The discipline is to move at the cadence of the workforce, not the cadence of the budget cycle, and the People leaders who hold that line tend to outlast the ones who do not.
Frequently Asked Questions About Distributed Collaboration
How do you build trust in a fully remote team?
Through repeated small commitments kept on time, written norms, and managers who model vulnerability. Trust is the cumulative result of many low-stakes interactions.
What metrics show distributed culture is working?
Look at participation in async channels, voluntary cross-team collaboration, and the speed at which new joiners reach productivity. Engagement surveys help, but behavior data is more reliable.
How often should distributed teams meet in person?
Most leaders settle on one or two gatherings per year per team, with smaller pod-level meetups in between. The point is shared experience, not face time.
How do you onboard new hires across time zones?
Pair them with a buddy in the same region, give them a 30-day plan with concrete milestones, and front-load relationship time before deep technical work.
What is the biggest mistake companies make with hybrid?
Treating it as a real estate decision rather than a way of working. Without explicit norms, hybrid often delivers the worst of both worlds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Connection at distance is the daily compound interest of small choices: how meetings are run, where decisions are written down, when people are expected to be online, and how feedback flows. Michael's teams do this well because they treat culture as a product their leaders ship every week.
The companies that bet on distributed work without rebuilding their operating habits are the ones now begging people back to the office. The ones that did the harder work are quietly winning the talent war.
See how AllVoices helps distributed teams keep employee voice flowing in every region.
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