Many of us enjoy the flexibility of remote and hybrid work. Less time wasted on commuting and more freedom for life beyond the workplace.

Here’s the flip side: our new flexibility also creates challenges, like building a connected company. The routine ways we used to do that—lunch outings, hallway chats, team-bonding exercises—are harder or not an option. The glue that holds our teams together is different.

So, what’s our new approach for creating connected teams? While it’s an easy one to push aside, the data shows strong workplace relationships are important for overall job satisfaction. Connection is key to happy employees and happy employees stick around, collaborate, and produce great work.

In the remote-hybrid era, where connection doesn’t happen as organically, leaders need to be more intentional about creating it.

Here’s what that might look like.

3 Ways to Build Connected Teams in the Remote Era

1) Incorporate values into daily work

Remote and hybrid teams spend more time working but, burrowed away in their home offices, there are few chances to connect to a sense of community and higher purpose. You can address this by making a conscious effort to weave values into projects and processes.

That might look like weekly values check-ins, where team members celebrate coworkers practicing company values in tangible day-to-day ways. Or, encouraging teams to start adding value-driven headlines to their projects.

2) Building emotional connections

We spend a lot of time communicating with coworkers through chat platforms and email. There ends up being little face time, and yet face-to-face interactions, even on video chat, help build emotional connection and understanding.

Try encouraging your team to move beyond their keyboards and build connections through one-on-one coffee breaks, or peer mentoring circles.

3) Encourage collaboration

Through collaborating across departments, employees create new connections, find new ways of thinking and a deeper understanding of their role in the ecosystem.

While many modern teams can’t step across the office, you can still try out interdepartmental projects. For example, create a company-wide initiative to improve customer experience with collaboration between customer service, marketing, and product development.

Work is changing, and we are too.

In the rush to catch up with the cutting edge, don’t forget about the foundation of our companies: people. We can’t avoid screens, but we can shift how we use them to connect with each other.

Let’s adapt together, meeting these new challenges as best we can. All it takes to start? Opening a new tab.