Dan Smolkin, Head of People Operations at Aurora Solar, has scaled the company from 45 employees in San Francisco to more than 250 distributed across the United States and Canada. His career started at Quixey as the ninth employee, where he built the people function from scratch, and he has spent his time since sharing tools and frameworks across the wider HR community. His view on distributed work is grounded in operating reality: meaningful experiences do not happen by default in distributed environments, but they can be designed.
The wider issue is that many companies still try to recreate office culture remotely, with predictable results. Recurring video happy hours, virtual coffee chats, and online team builders feel forced because they were not designed for the medium. The signals employees actually want, recognition, growth, connection with peers, and a sense of belonging, can be delivered remotely, but only with intentional design.
HR leaders who want distributed work to feel meaningful have to rethink experience design from scratch. Patches on the in-office model do not produce belonging; deliberate work does.
Why distributed experiences need their own design language
Distributed work changes what experience design has to deliver. HBR's research on revitalizing culture in hybrid environments lays out the dynamics; HBR's research on revitalizing culture in hybrid work shows how the highest-performing companies replace serendipity with structure.
For HR leaders, the practical move is to design rituals and moments that work for the medium, not against it. AllVoices' pulse surveys help people leaders track whether the rituals are landing or just adding to the calendar.
Designing for distributed work also means working with remote managers and remote employees as a population with their own experience needs, not as a deviation from in-office norms.
Building experiences that travel across distance
What kinds of moments matter most for distributed teams?
Onboarding, first project wins, peer connection, manager check-ins, recognition, and career conversations all carry more weight in distributed environments than they do in offices. The reason is simple: there is no hallway to fill the gaps. Each designed moment has to do more work.
HBR's research on protecting culture in remote work walks through the practices; HBR's research on protecting culture in remote work shows the patterns that hold up over time.
How do you keep distributed onboarding from feeling impersonal?
Build a 30-60-90 plan with structured peer connections, manager check-ins, and clear early wins. Pair every new hire with a buddy outside their immediate team. Run video manager-to-manager handoffs so the new hire's history travels with them.
Use onboarding design that respects the medium. The first month sets the pattern that follows.
What actually works
Replace serendipity with structure
In-office cultures rely on chance encounters: hallway conversations, lunch lines, water cooler moments. Distributed cultures cannot rely on those, so leaders have to build structured equivalents. Rotating coffee pairings, structured cross-team rituals, and intentional in-person moments together cover the gap.
Use virtual mentoring programs to connect employees across geographies. The structure produces relationships that proximity once did.
Make recognition visible across the company
Distributed recognition has to travel. Public, written, asynchronous recognition, in team channels, in newsletters, in all-hands moments, reaches employees who would otherwise be invisible. Train managers to write recognition the way they would speak it in an office, with detail and warmth.
Pair recognition with engagement data. AllVoices' employee survey tool helps surface where recognition is and is not landing.
Treat in-person moments as high-use investments
The in-person moments that distributed teams do have are precious. Offsites, team gatherings, and customer visits all carry more weight than they would in an office-default culture. Design those moments deliberately, with clear goals and intentional design.
Avoid filling them with content. The point of in-person time is the human side of work, which is exactly what distributed schedules cannot easily provide.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Distributed teams produce ER cases that look different from in-office work: complaints about manager favoritism toward employees in certain regions, perceptions of overwork, or concerns about how decisions get communicated across distance. AllVoices' employee relations function support helps HR leaders surface these patterns early. Our HR case management system keeps documentation consistent across teams and geographies.
How does ER reinforce distributed experience design?
ER teams catch patterns that experience surveys miss. Repeated cases tied to a particular region, manager, or transition reveal where the design is not yet working. Sharing those patterns with leaders, with appropriate confidentiality, gives the company a chance to fix the underlying gap before it shows up in attrition.
That feedback loop is what keeps distributed cultures honest as they scale.
Frequently Asked Questions About Distributed Workplaces
How do you measure whether distributed culture is working?
Use engagement scores, attrition rates broken down by region and manager, ER case patterns, and exit interview themes together. The combination shows whether design is producing the experience you want.
What is the manager's role in distributed culture?
Central. Distributed managers shape the daily experience for their teams more directly than in-office managers do. Train them explicitly on the practices that distance demands.
How often should distributed teams meet in person?
Depends on the work, but every quarter for full team gatherings is a common rhythm. The point is not frequency; it is intentionality when the time happens.
How do you keep remote employees from feeling invisible?
Build distributed-first defaults. Run meetings as if everyone is remote, even when some are in-office. Recognize publicly in writing. Avoid promoting in-office staff faster than remote staff at similar performance levels.
How do anonymous channels fit a distributed culture?
They give employees a way to raise concerns about distance, fairness, or manager behavior that they cannot raise directly. Used well, those signals strengthen the design over time.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Dan Smolkin's work scaling Aurora Solar through distributed growth points to a clear pattern. Distributed cultures do not happen by default. They get designed through onboarding, recognition, in-person investment, and ER infrastructure that catches the moments when design and reality diverge.
HR leaders who do this work produce distributed companies that feel coherent across distance. Skip the work, and the same distance that promised flexibility quietly produces invisibility, attrition, and the slow erosion of culture.
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