Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
Gustavo Razzetti’s Remote Not Distant makes the case that hybrid and remote work don’t automatically erode culture, poor intentional design does, and that leaders who treat culture as something to actively engineer can build genuinely connected teams without being in the same room.
Razzetti is particularly useful on rituals: specific, repeatable practices, from how meetings open to how wins get celebrated, that create a shared culture deliberately rather than relying on the incidental hallway conversations that in-person offices provided almost by accident.
The book pushes back on both extremes, forcing everyone back to the office out of nostalgia, and assuming remote work requires no deliberate culture-building at all, arguing instead for intentional design that fits how a specific team actually works.
We recommend this book because so many organisations are still treating hybrid work as a logistics problem rather than a culture design problem, and Razzetti gives leaders a practical way to think about the difference.
- Distance is physical, disconnection is a design failure, not an inevitable result of remote work
- Deliberate rituals can recreate the connective function of incidental office interactions
- Hybrid work needs active culture design, not just policy decisions about days in office
- Culture in distributed teams should be engineered, not assumed to happen on its own
Identify one connective ritual your team lost when it went remote or hybrid, and redesign a deliberate replacement for it rather than hoping it re-emerges naturally.
We give this book four out of five stars.
