Health-tech startup

Building psychological safety across time zones: how a remote health-tech team learned to thrive together

August 20245 min read

A year of fast hiring left a remote-by-design team of 15, spread across three continents, with no shared culture. We built one from scratch: trust, a healthy way to handle conflict, and the safety to fail.

A distributed team collaborating remotely

0, 0%, 0people, remote, shared culture
0continents, 9 time zones
0team, with a real sense of belonging

The client

The client is an innovative healthcare tech startup, founded by a prominent medic. The company uses data and medical record analysis to support patients and their healthcare providers in mapping a path to improved health outcomes.

The challenge

The company had got off to an impressive start, growing from 2 to 15 employees in the space of a year. These new starters were all based in different locations across the US, as well as Italy and Singapore. The multigenerational team also came from a range of professional backgrounds: some were doctors, some engineers, and some specialised in business and finance.

The company grew that fast on its own. What the speed of hiring left behind was a team with no shared culture: no common language, no agreed way of working, no habits that everyone recognised. Nobody had been in the room long enough to build one.

All communication was remote, across time zones, cultures, and disciplines. So our client was faced with a significant challenge: building a culture from scratch, and with it a tight, efficient, mutually supportive team, out of a diverse group of people, many of whom had never met in person.

Significant, but not impossible. The company's Chief Operations Officer had undertaken a two-day Team Accelerator with Wise Humanity while working for another employer. She knew that our transformative, holistic approach was exactly what this new startup needed.

The goals

The COO's familiarity with Wise Humanity meant that she knew we'd be able to help her define her goals by assessing the company's challenges.

Creating trust
The new team had already bonded to some degree; they shared common goals, and had got to know one another over Zoom. What was missing was that interpersonal trust that's so much easier to build in an in-person work environment, and a common language that puts everyone on the same playing field. Meeting every day, sitting down over coffee, going for lunch: these simple everyday interactions create an organic intimacy that's hard to replicate in a virtual space. And while online work has been a temporary reality for many companies, this startup is remote by design. So creating trust wasn't just a nice to have. It was a fundamental, necessary task, and one that needed a novel solution.
Managing conflict
Good faith goes a long way, and so does non-verbal communication. While arguments can always get out of hand, it's much easier to manage conflict when you work together in person. What's more, conflict can be very positive. Sometimes it's the clash of opposing ideas that leads to a brand-new solution. The nature of our client's work means that challenging conversations can't, and shouldn't, be avoided. With a team of specialists working at the forefront of data technology, disagreement is both inevitable and productive. This meant that creating a healthy culture around conflict was a key part of building mutual trust.
Fostering a sense of safety
As any scientist will tell you, you can't learn without failing. What's more, the fear of failure can hold people back from taking creative risks that just might pay off. This is especially true in workplaces that stigmatise failure, holding team members to excessively rigid standards, or encouraging perfectionism at the cost of innovation. As an innovative tech startup, our client had to ensure that failure would not become a source of shame. Each employee needed to understand that we all make mistakes, and that the crucial thing is to learn and move forward, together, as a community. In other words, they needed to feel psychologically safe within their team, and free to unleash their creative force.

The solution

Wise Humanity created a custom Team Accelerator for the client, with modules designed to address the specific goals and challenges we've outlined here. The brief was not to fix a broken culture; it was to build one from scratch, fast enough to keep up with the hiring.

The course was organised to accommodate the team's intensive work schedule and different locations. Even with a flexible schedule, this was a serious investment of time and energy. Each participant was given an individual half-hour coaching session, ensuring that they were fully on board, and familiar with the goals and structure of the training.

It created a strong sense of belonging among all of us.

The outcome

Wise Humanity's Team Accelerator proved to be exactly what this new startup needed. The tools and strategies provided helped to create a bond between team members, clarifying communication, fostering trust, and creating a sense of belonging that was non-existent before.

Where a year of fast hiring had left no shared culture, there was now one team with a common language, an agreed way of working, and a real sense of belonging.

The client was able to meet their specified goals, but they also discovered a further benefit. With the insight gained from Wise Humanity, the team was able to revolutionise their client relationships, bringing an emotionally intelligent approach to sensitive and highly personal interactions.

A laptop showing a video call with a remote team spread across time zones — Three continents, nine time zones, and one culture built on purpose.

Testimonials

Testimonials from the company's Team Accelerator participants

It created a strong sense of belonging among all of us.
We are a better company after the Team Accelerator.
The most sceptical participant was the first to ask for more at the end of the Team Accelerator.
I learned new tools to handle stress and anxiety, new ways to make progress, new ways to think about problems.
I would highly recommend the Team Accelerator to any company!