Başak Büyükçelen has transformed remote culture into a strategic advantage in her role as CEO of Pressbooks, a global EdTech company where creating culture goes far beyond shared office space. “Remote work in and of itself is a culture and it is a part of the company culture,” says Büyükçelen. Her commitment to this idea, paired with people-first systems and careful measurement, has helped Pressbooks grow into a high-trust, high-performance organization dedicated to making educational publishing more inclusive.
Diversity as an Operating System
Two formative work experiences shaped Büyükçelen’s leadership philosophy: working across borders and sectors. While with a Korean–Turkish joint venture, she saw first-hand how norms, hierarchy, and social rituals influence performance and belonging, underscoring how “cultural expectations shape the daily rhythm of work” and the sense of community within a company. Later, when she relocated to Canada, she began to see more clearly how the strength of built-in diversity shaped everyday interactions and workplace culture — for the better. “Canada has a natural diversity because it has a lot of immigrants. You already have a natural diversity within the society. You just can’t escape from it.”
Diversity, combined with the lessons she learned about how culture shapes work, has emerged as a key operating advantage. Hiring for varied backgrounds, cultures, and age groups expands problem solving and product quality. “The more diverse of a team that you have, the more perspectives that you’re going to receive and that’s going to help shape your product, your business, your decisions,” she says. For an enterprise vendor serving universities and systems with distinct needs, that breadth of perspective becomes a competitive edge.
Make Remote Part of Identity
For Büyükçelen, culture doesn’t require a physical office. It is about embracing and practicing it consistently. If a company chooses remote, it must fully commit to that choice. “If you embrace remote work, it needs to be a part of your identity. It needs to be a part of your culture.” That begins with disciplined hiring and trust. “To trust the people that you hire, you need to hire really well,” she says. At Pressbooks, this has had a significant impact on the organization’s retention rates and overall stability.
With the right people in place, intentional rituals keep relationships warm and information flowing. Monthly virtual socials rotate among team hosts, with low-stakes games designed to reveal the person behind the job title. “It’s a rotating thing, design a game of the month. It’s usually tailored towards getting to know each other better.” The leadership team shows up consistently, signaling that connection time is not optional.
Equally important for Büyükçelen are 15-minute CEO check-ins with every employee that mimic the spontaneity of a hallway conversation. “We just randomly talk about stuff, just like you would at a water cooler conversation,” shares Büyükçelen.
Structure the Week for Energy, Not Surveillance
While many have seen how remote work can collapse boundaries and overload calendars, Büyükçelen addresses that challenge with structural guardrails. Pressbooks protects a weekly no-meeting focus day so teams can dive into deep work without context switching. The company has also adopted a four-day workweek that coincided with its transition to remote, a move that reframed productivity around outcomes rather than hours. “You have to continuously measure not only your KPIs but also internally. Let’s do surveys, ask people how they’re doing.”
Equity matters as much as efficiency. Savings from office rent are routed back to employees through internet reimbursement, home office stipends, and company-wide retreats that create shared memories. “You have to say, what am I gaining in terms of money that we’re not spending on rent, how do I spend that back to the company. You’re not pocketing that, you have to give that back to the people.” That reciprocity builds goodwill, which, in her experience, has fueled discretionary effort when it counts.
Prove It With Data
Büyükçelen insists on evidence, pointing to multiple indicators across the business. Agile teams track sprint velocity against planned outcomes, commercial leaders monitor pipeline and booked revenue, and the company runs regular sentiment surveys to capture energy and focus. Together, these measures paint a consistent picture: that Pressbooks has maintained strong performance, resilience, and employee engagement in a fully remote model.
“We hired a remote sales team and our sales has been going up and up and up. So how can I, as someone who used to work in the office, assume that we’re not being productive?” she says. Strong results, low turnover, and a deep applicant pool for open roles reinforce the conclusion that remote, done deliberately, is a performance model.
Scale With Guardrails and Humanity
As remote organizations continue to expand, even as a significant return to office trend is underway in the US, two challenges dominate. The first is maintaining hiring quality across time zones and teams. The second is time-zone complexity itself. Pressbooks sets shared hours for real-time collaboration while allowing individuals to work at their most productive times. Büyükçelen models that flexibility and expects the same empathy across the company. “You have to trust that the people that you’ve hired want you to succeed as a business. So they’re going to contribute to your end goals.” Life happens, and the policy response is trust. For Büyükçelen, the path is clear: hire with care, treat diversity as a system, codify connection, and measure what matters. “The more you open to that and the more you embrace that difference of ideas, the more successful you end up becoming.”
Follow Başak Büyükçelen on LinkedIn for more insights on how to build company culture in remote settings.
