Team culture is how people on a team work together and treat each other. It shows up in the ways you communicate, recognize each other, work together, and make decisions. Done right, it fuels great teamwork.

But too often, culture becomes more of an afterthought. Creating a healthy work environment for your team means investing in team culture — not just during quarterly team-building events and offsites — but every single day. And for remote and hybrid teams, that don’t connect in person regularly, building culture can be even more challenging.

With Range, teams can integrate small moments of team-building every day to build trust and strengthen culture over time. With clear visibility into in-flight work, Check-ins (http://check-ins) help foster transparency, trust, and open communication. Answering team-building questions and sharing moods help the team get to know each other, even when you’re spread across offices or timezones. Reactions and replies make it fun, natural, and lightweight to engage too, offering a space to show support and celebrate each other’s work.

In this article, we’ll cover how to:

1. Build trust and transparency by checking in each day
2. Get to know each other with team questions and moods
3. Engage and show support with reactions and comments
4. Take advantage of existing meetings as a space to connect

1. Build trust and transparency by checking in each day

Check-ins help build transparency and trust by making it easy to share work and connect with each other in a lightweight way.

To get started with Check-ins, you’ll want to decide on a cadence and set a schedule for sharing. Creating a regular schedule helps your team know exactly when to share and, over time, creates a habit of checking in. Many teams choose to share Check-ins daily or every other day.

Range comes with the following default schedule for Check-ins:

• Participants: Everyone
• Check-in days: All weekdays
• Check-in reminder: 9:00 AM
• Check-in summary sent: 1:00 PM
• Time zone: Distributed (schedule is localized across timezones)

To edit the default schedule or create your own, go to Settings > Check-in customization.

2. Get to know each other with team questions and moods

The “Connect with your team” section of each Check-in is a lightweight way to build trust by getting to know your teammates a little better each day.

It starts with a daily team-building question, designed by expert coaches as a fun and meaningful way to connect. Questions change daily and cover everything from foundational topics (like communication style) to personal life (like a favorite meal to cook).

Below the team question is your daily mood, where you can share how you’re feeling using an emoji. Moods help build psychological safety (that’s the ability to show emotion without fear of negative consequences) and help build up team trust by creating a space where people can be vulnerable.

Moods are grouped by colors — green for feeling good, red for days when you’re more distracted or overwhelmed, and yellow for when you feel somewhere in between. You can scroll through each color to find an emoji that best describes how you’re doing, and then share with your team in just a couple of clicks.

3. Engage and show support with reactions and comments

Reading and reacting to each other’s Check-ins is a great way to show support for your teammates, motivate each other, and build accountability around daily work,

You can react any time someone you follow shares a Check-in. To add a reaction, hover over a check-in item, click on the smile icon then choose a reaction from the emoji picker. You can also add comments.

4. Take advantage of existing meetings as a space to connect

There’s no substitute for face-to-face connection, but sometimes adding another team-building event or meeting to your calendar just isn’t a viable (or time-effective) option. Range helps teams build small moments of connection into existing team meetings to make time together more engaging and meaningful.

When you use the Range meeting tool to run your meeting, it’ll prompt you to do a round-robin check-in with each other at the beginning of the meeting — this is called an opening round. During this time, you might go around and answer a quick team-building question or just check in about how you’re doing that day. You’ll also be prompted to do a quick closing round at the end of the meeting — where folks might share how they thought the meeting went, how things have shifted during the meeting, or how moods have changed.

Try it out

Investing in your team’s culture determines whether you create a healthy, positive work environment for your team or a toxic one.

With Range, it’s easier to provide a healthy, supportive work environment for your team by investing in small actions each day.

To get started, head to Range and set up Check-in customization for your team.

To bring your team on board, the following article offers guidance and tips to help everyone find their Check-in groove.