BG Lab: Enabling the Workplace – How Companies Build Culture that Performs
by Carel Ariola, Editorial Contributor
The Challenge
Organizations everywhere are trying to sustain performance and culture while work becomes more distributed and less tied to a physical office. Yet engagement is moving in the wrong direction. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged and estimated the cost of low engagement at $10 trillion—about 9% of global GDP.
At the same time, loneliness and stress remain elevated, and fully remote workers often report higher loneliness than on-site peers. For leaders, the question is no longer whether culture matters; it is whether culture can be built intentionally at scale. That requires designing conditions that help people do their best work across locations and time zones.
A Remote-First Model That Works
Birches Group is remote-first, operating across North America, Oceania, Asia, and Europe. There are no large office spaces, and staff typically meet in person only for scheduled activities once a quarter, sometimes less.
In a recent staff survey distributed to all employees at Birches Group LLC, employees were asked what they valued most about working for the company, and one of the top values was workplace culture. In remote and hybrid work settings, the result raises a practical question for HR and business leaders:
Can we deliberately design the conditions that enable people to do their best work across locations and time zones?
The Birches Group Model
Creating an enabling environment is a core responsibility of the organization, regardless of how work is delivered. Through policies and practices that promote clarity, responsiveness, and growth, staff are enabled to contribute meaningfully to the mission of the organization.
An enabling environment encompasses:
- Clarity: Work conditions that focus on explicit outcomes, standards, and decisions
- Connection: A commitment to growth through collaboration with employees
- Capability: A commitment to deliver internal services
Birches Group’s work focuses on output over process, and this philosophy shapes how work is delivered. It translates to a set of enabling principles, policies, and tools that broadly facilitate and support performance. Given the clients and sectors we serve, which are found everywhere in the world and across time zones, being a remote-first organization enables us to serve them better. Birches Group has deliberately built a workforce and a workplace that advance our mission as an organization. This model allows us to build an effective workplace, which is not a fixed place, that performs.
Clarity: Outcomes, Standards, and Autonomy
Birches Group’s work focuses on purpose over process, and this philosophy shapes how work is delivered. It translates to a set of enabling practices and work features that broadly facilitate and support performance.
Clarity, Trust, and Autonomy
Clarity at Birches Group starts with making outcomes explicit. There are no fixed shifts, no attendance checks, and no daily paperwork to prove activity. Instead, staff align with their leaders on what must be delivered, by when, and to what standard, then structure their schedules around those agreed outputs.
This approach creates trust and real autonomy. Whether someone joins as an experienced professional or fresh out of college, the emphasis is on delivering quality work without unnecessary control or handholding. To keep expectations consistent, Birches Group defines performance standards by job grade level, so employees can see what “good” looks like and leaders can coach against shared criteria.
Over time, performance results show the impact of this clarity: consistent delivery against defined expectations.
Connection: Deliberate Engagement and Collaboration
In a remote-first environment, the organization maintains alignment and belonging through predictable touchpoints that make it easy to collaborate, get support, and build relationships across time zones without defaulting to constant meetings or “always on” availability.
The practices below focus on connection where it matters most: solving complex problems faster, reducing communication lag, and creating space for informal community—three drivers of engagement in distributed teams.
- In-person sessions: Engagement is reinforced through deliberate in-person activities (e.g., trainings and targeted alignment sessions) designed to tackle complex problems that benefit from live interaction.
- Core hours: For two hours each day, the team maintains a shared window when staff should be available online to respond, unblock others, and ask for support—reducing the lag that can come with fully asynchronous schedules.
- Employee-led communities: In addition to HR-facilitated activities, employees are empowered to form interest groups and social clubs. Groups such as food, fitness, parenting, and gaming help staff connect around shared interests outside of work, strengthening belonging and engagement.
These connection mechanisms show up in how employees report their experience over time.
In the last Climate Survey sent out to all staff in 2025, Birches Group’s overall employee engagement score was 3.24 out of 4.0, showing active engagement and satisfaction across multiple employment areas.
Capability: Service-Oriented, Digitally Enabled Support
Capability is the organization’s ability to make it easy for employees to do great work. At Birches Group, that means providing reliable internal services, accessible information, and simple digital tools that remove friction, so time and attention stay focused on client delivery and problem-solving.
Rather than building a heavy process, Birches Group invests in practical, self-serve support. Employees can access shared guidance through a knowledge base and use online-enabled HR services for common needs. When situations require judgment (e.g., sensitive or complex cases), HR remains available for consultation. Tools and workflows are continuously refined as needs and technologies evolve.
- Principle: Keep internal services frictionless and easy to navigate.
- Self-serve support: Provide a knowledge base and online workflows so employees can get answers and complete requests quickly.
- Human support when it matters: Ensure HR is available for nuanced guidance and exceptions, not just transactions.
Together, these capability practices reinforce shared norms at Birches Group, respect for deadlines, surfacing issues early, a priority for clarity and responsiveness, and respect for one another’s time because employees can access the right information and support without unnecessary delay.
The Bottom Line
When employers invest in deliberate practices that enable work, culture becomes easier to sustain in
remote and hybrid settings. Birches Group’s experience highlights the following: Clarity (explicit outcomes and standards that support autonomy), Connection (predictable touchpoints that maintain collaboration and belonging), and Capability (service-oriented, digitally enabled support that reduces friction and helps people deliver).
The lesson is not that remote work automatically produces a strong culture. It is that culture is the result
of design choices. When organizations intentionally build clarity, connection, and capability into the day-to-day experience of work, employees are more likely to feel supported, aligned, and able to do great work together, wherever they are.
Carel manages our internal human resources function and is heavily involved in recruitment, skills assessment, and performance management for the team, assisting managers with all aspects of HR. She also oversees our accounting, invoicing, and facilities management in Manila.
