Louise Butler is the VP of People at CitySwift and an award-winning learning and talent professional. On Reimagining Company Culture, she joins us to talk about the daily craft of building holistic, distributed culture. Her vantage point matters: CitySwift operates internationally, and Louise has spent her career proving that distributed culture is not a downgrade from in-person culture. It just requires different operating habits, different leadership behaviors, and a different relationship with time.
Her core argument: culture is what teams do every Tuesday morning, not what is on a poster.
Why Distributed Culture Demands New Habits
In-person culture coasts on proximity. Distributed culture has to be designed. Gallup's hybrid work indicator found that hybrid workers report higher engagement than fully on-site employees, but only when the team has set its own norms together.
That data point is not an accident. Distributed teams that thrive almost always have explicit working agreements about meetings, async communication, decision rights, and flexible scheduling. The teams that struggle usually skipped that step.
What Holistic Culture Looks Like in Practice
Onboarding includes culture, not just role
New hires get the systems, the people, and the stories. The first 90 days set the trajectory.
Managers run regular 1:1s focused on the whole person
Career, well-being, and feedback all show up in 1:1s. Managers who only run task-status check-ins miss the cultural signal.
Recognition flows in multiple directions
Peer-to-peer recognition matters as much as top-down praise. The pattern of recognition is a culture diagnostic on its own.
Designing for Belonging at Distance
Belonging in a distributed company requires deliberate ritual. Deloitte's 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report found that belonging at work, being seen, supported, and connected to purpose, is one of the strongest predictors of intent to stay.
Louise's teams build rituals around company culture that range from weekly Slack rituals to quarterly meetups. The cumulative effect is what makes employees feel like they belong somewhere, not just somewhere they log into.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Distributed companies need low-friction ways to raise issues. Anonymous reporting and HR case management provide the channels that office hallways cannot. Without them, leaders lose visibility into the small problems that grow into attrition.
Louise treats this infrastructure as part of the culture, not separate from it.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 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 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. 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 Culture
How do you onboard new hires across time zones?
Pair them with a regional buddy, give them a written 30-60-90 plan, and protect their first two weeks for relationship-building before deep technical work.
How often should distributed teams meet in person?
Most teams find that one or two off-sites per year, plus occasional pod-level meetups, hits the right balance.
What is the biggest mistake in distributed culture?
Assuming that good people will figure it out. Norms have to be explicit, written, and reviewed.
How do you handle time-zone equity?
Rotate meeting times, document decisions in writing, and resist defaulting to the headquarters time zone for everything.
How do you measure distributed culture?
Use participation, retention, and qualitative pulse data. Engagement scores alone miss the texture.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Louise's career shows that distributed culture is built one habit at a time. The companies that pull ahead in this model invest in manager training, codify their norms, and treat belonging as a designed outcome rather than a hopeful side effect.
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