How Deel Builds a Thriving Global Culture with 7,000 Remote Employees Across 120 Countries

As the world’s largest remote company, Deel employs 7,000 people across 120 countries and faces the unique challenge of maintaining a strong culture without a physical office. In a hypergrowth environment, traditional HR playbooks fall short, requiring innovative strategies to keep engagement high.

Rethinking Onboarding for a Remote-First World

With 300 new hires onboarded weekly across the globe, Deel has rebuilt onboarding from scratch. Culture begins from day zero, not day one, with new hires receiving e-learning modules, video content, and leadership messages that explain Deel’s origin story, mission, and values. Playful assets like an onboarding "joke playbook" help employees understand remote work realities by swapping office instructions with remote equivalents (e.g., "head to the Ask-IT Slack channel"). The goal is to generate excitement while clarifying how work gets done in a fully remote environment.

Making Values Real in Hiring and Onboarding

For Deel, culture and values aren’t just posters on a wall—they’re intentionally woven into assessment and onboarding. Every candidate undergoes a dedicated culture interview focused on alignment with Deel’s values. These values are reinforced in onboarding through live sessions on the founding story and values, with leaders spotlighting how they apply in day-to-day decisions. This ensures consistency between recruitment promises and the employee experience.

A core value is "together everywhere", which is emphasized in new-hire sessions where time is carved out for global peers to connect. Cohorts include people from all corners of the world sharing why they joined, celebrating the truly global workforce. To foster connection, Deel offers initiatives like a personal travel budget for employees to visit colleagues and "Deel dinners" funding in-person meetups in local hubs. At year-end, a global all-hands session features a "work from anywhere" photo competition, reinforcing flexibility and community.

Rethinking Communication: Slack as “the Office”

With employees across countless time zones, Deel fully embraces asynchronous working models. Slack is treated as "the office," where most work, collaboration, and feedback happen. Voice notes, written updates, and frequent huddles replace traditional meetings, enabling quick issue resolution without waiting for calendar slots. This approach prioritizes speed, clarity, and progress over conventional best practices like face-to-face feedback.

To avoid silos in a remote business, Deel recently appointed its first internal communications manager, sharpening company-wide and product all-hands sessions. Clear, intentional communication is key to experiencing culture in a remote-first organization.

Flexibility as an Inclusion Strategy

Remote work at global scale creates a 24-hour operating environment, but Deel ensures flexibility doesn’t mean 24-hour workdays. The focus is on output and impact, not presence. Flexible hours are framed as an inclusion issue, supporting working parents and those with caring responsibilities by allowing them to design their day. Performance is judged on delivery and outcomes, making policies that respect life commitments a significant differentiator in the global talent market.

The Next Frontier of Global Culture

Deel acknowledges it’s still on the journey, with hypergrowth and evolving internal communications. The emerging blueprint involves designing every stage of the employee journey for remote-first, global realities. The "together everywhere" philosophy helps maintain culture, engagement, and flexibility across a global, remote workforce, building something genuinely different rather than recreating the office online.