Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

Slack / IM often, don't demand a response instantly though, async & remote go hand in hand.

Put important stuff in email not slack/IM

Have a company wiki

Prefer video calls for alignment

Write to each other often, spend time crafting written narratives, 1-pagers, amazon 6-pagers etc. to share ideas, make people read them, use google docs or ms word online and get comments inline in the document using those tools, follow up on video calls to confirm alignment.

Gitlab has a handbook for this stuff, they are a 100% remote business and very open about their practices: https://handbook.gitlab.com/

consider personal readme's if your team is a bit larger (example): https://gitlab.com/swiskow/swiskow

One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.

A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.

Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe? So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't need chatter, just code" types.

What becomes apparent very quickly outside the imposed rigidity of a physical office is that different individuals and different roles all have different optimal communication patterns. And people can get really fussy if they aren't getting the structure/tools/freedoms/whatever that they feel they need.

And so the answer to your question is ultimately much more idiosyncratic than you're hoping it to be. Whatever answers you find here, take them as inspiration for things to try out rather than specific things to do.

With that said, effective communication patterns tend to naturally snowball, so if you can start getting people feeling connected and collaborative, you'll find that they'll naturally keep that up and build on it.

But you are going to need to throw some spaghetti at the wall to see what your team needs in order to get that process started.

Try to reduce the number of required sync meetings in favor of async alternatives. For the required sync meetings, make sure there is a rock solid agenda and EVERYONE knows what is expected from them going in. Make sure the meetings cover meaningful material and helpful to all attendees. Encourage everyone to speak up and contribute. If you find certain individuals not contributing or not prepared, proactively have a conversation with them outside the meeting to reset expectations.

For async communication, it can still be helpful to set specific windows of time for things to get discussed. Example, Mondays 9am-Noon ET we review/discuss sprint goals. I like to record short videos with Loom to kick off discussions like this. Make sure to center these types of communication around specific tools, e.g. JIRA, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. Make sure the discussions convert to traceable decisions in your tooling.

First off learn to relax. breathe. Just because people aren’t constantly communicating doesn’t mean nothing is happening.

Learn to embrace long pauses in video calls. Learn to accept that a response to a message sometimes takes several minutes or even an hour to come through.

You said everything is going well. Okay, so what’s the problem then? The amount of communication currently happening clearly must be sufficient, otherwise things would not be going well. Right?

Just chill.

> No plans to be in person

Figure out how to have some kind of face-to-face relationship. This could be an annual all-hands trip, or otherwise take a week to fly out and spend time with the person you work with.

You learn A LOT about each other when you interact face-to-face. I once worked with two developers in India, and assumed that the shy one was just so-so, and the talkative one was brilliant.

After some deep day-long conversations, and a few day trips, I realized my assumptions were completely wrong: The shy one was shy, and the talkative one spoke before thinking.

---

More recently, I started work with a hybrid team. I live 60 miles from the office, but it's brutal commute. I go in once a week.

I have found that the key to running remote teams is cadence, communication, and connection. This is more difficult with a remote team, so you need to be much more intentional. Remote teams that are not connecting tend to focus solely on work and miss the purpose behind everything you do.

Here is a simple cadence: hold all-team group meetings to share core values, mission, and to keep the vision in front of the team. Next, create smaller groups if you are managing a larger team, and encourage introverts to participate alongside extroverts to build relationships within the team. By doing so, the team will work harder and even help each other as a cohesive unit. While it takes effort to build, it is worth it.

The final step is communication, which we all know is vital. With a remote team, you sometimes have to over communicate since there are no casual water cooler chats or coffee breaks to connect informally. This requires a time investment to develop, but the return is a longer-lasting team with minimal turnover. It's worth the effort to build a great remote team.

If you're in similar time zones, try https://www.gather.town/ ?

I've used it for remote conferences, and I like its 2D UI. Real sense of space there.

Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks.

Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about arbitrary things. It's better if this chat has history which expires in 24 hours.

Write lots of short documents -- especially for designs. Review them much like you would review code. This can be as simple as Markdown documents in your repository using your normal code review tool. Ensure all documents are listed in a single easy-to-find index of some sort.

We do three things:

First, we use Missive to integrate email and chat. This way everything's in one place, properly threaded, and we can easily discuss emails internally in context. Much much better than GMail + Slack.

Second, I run video chat office hours twice a week (Tuesday/Thursday). Anybody can drop in to discuss anything — or not, if there's no need. This lowers the activation energy for "in person" discussions that otherwise might not get scheduled and promotes async work the rest of the time.

Third, regular company offsites! Even a few days a year is good.

One thing I've found useful is to have deliberate google meet calls when having planning discussions or firming up decisions.

I set up the recording and transcription and then up front we define the problem and what we want the outcome to be. Afterwards I give the transcription to ChatGPT and get it to summarise the content, decisions, etc and add that to our documentation with a link to the recording.

This helps you stay on the same page and also gives context to people who werent present about what has been discussed and decided.

Huge bias here as I work for Figma, but multiplayer collaborative editors like Figma do wonders.

We run nearly everything out of a figma or figjam file. Retros, planning, etc. There's something really nice about being able to see everyones cursors at once, and feeling like you're collaboratively creating something. Presos and slide decks often feel very one-direction from a data flow perspective, which becomes problematic for remote-only roles.

Slack / IM often

Use video chat for meetings (encourage camera on but don't require it - management should lead by example)

Be kind. Reach out using other forms of communication (like snail mail) if you want to encourage each other with thank you notes, etc.

Use some kind of shared wiki for long term 'shared ownership' documentation. Don't be afraid to lead by example. Don't be obtuse. Give visual examples of processes, technical components, etc.

Lean into visual examples everywhere you can (screenshots, mock-ups, diagrams, etc).

In video chat, screen share and encourage use of annotations when discussing things. (Zoom has this feature and it's awesome)

Use an agile cadence. Encourage people to share questions / concerns at story grooming sessions (which should be regular). Also encourage feedback at retrospectives (which should also happen regularly). Managers should lead by example in blameless retrospectives and lean into positive feedback.

If you're a team of all dudes (or any one thing), you have a blindspot with perspective. You should rectify that.

I work from the USA with people only in Singapore and India.

I wrote "Writing style for Slack" a couple years ago if you're interested:

https://www.kcoleman.me/writing/slack/2023/03/11/writing-sty...

I worked for multiple companies remotely and the thing that worked the best for me was:

- Everyone must be connected to Discord in an audio room. - Encourage pair programming. - Record every meeting make them available to everyone. - Log every decision in a central place, easy to browse and discover. - Meet regularly (IRL) with you colleagues.

By far the most important point is always being on Discord. You can quicky jump in someone's room and feel very connected to your teammates. Obviously, like in a real office, don't disturb someone if it can be managed asynchronously.

WhatsApp is very common for smaller simpler projects, and I'm pretty happy with it.

My main communication related complaint is when it just doesn't happen at all.

Plans change and nobody tells me so I work on cancelled features, only one person actually knows what's happening and they're busy so you don't want to ask them about every detail, minutes are not taken at meetings.

I also would prefer calenders be managed better. Google shared calendars are amazing, I'm sure there's something similar people like for bigger projects where some people use apple... But nobody seems to really see the need for anytime like that.

Try using video meetings through virtual frosted glass via MeetingGlass (https://meetingglass.com/).

This will give you the feeling of being at the same desk, with the opportunity for quick, spontaneous conversations and collaboration.

Here you can find articles about virtual frosted glass: https://meetingglass.substack.com/

Regular group discussions (not standup) are important. My team meets 30-60 minutes four days a week to discuss technical details and long term strategy.

It plays two important roles

1. establish rapport between team members

2. gives known space for issues. Leads to Better balance of focus time and group convo

This is the most important meeting of the day. Create doc to people can add things to the agenda. Managers job is to keep the meeting relevant, efficient.

Outside of that. Devs encouraged to pair together separately for troubleshooting.

1:1s are critical early on. DO NOT CANCEL THEM. And keep them relevant

Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.

1. gather.town 2. Zulip (nuances of design much better than other chat systems for remote work specifically) 3. the 'latent energy' is going to be lower when people aren't eating lunch together and rubbing shoulders. you have to bring the energy to an empty room all the time when working remote. this also has to be exemplified by founders. doesn't mean loudness but instilling a sense of urgency etc.

The most important thing to me about remote communication is making time for "coffee catchup" to chat about non-work things.

We literally sit down with a fresh coffee for 5mins just as we might when crossing paths in the office. Find common topics among colleagues to shoot the breeze - football, video games, cars, etc.

Soon you'll have cross-team relationships with people who might never work directly together.

On the softer side, I found remote work to be painfully dry the past few years so created a small Slack extension to add color / life / levity to internal communication. Collect team quotes & images, make memes. It's added a lot of joy to teams, especially eng teams.

https://www.usecubby.com

If you find yourself constantly trying to explain stuff visually, invest on a graphics tablet. Even a "cheap" <100 EUR goes a long way.

As for the "whiteboard", just opening Excalidraw when you need it is very low friction in my experience. Google Jamboard and Miro were okay-ish, I guess, but for me the simplicity and responsiveness of Excalidraw is still better.

https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13...

https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/remote-culture-at-hashic...

https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/the-remote-developer-s-p...

Stripe's Increment had an entire issue devoted to remote work: https://increment.com/remote/

Tools like Slack for instant messaging, Zoom for video calls, and platforms like Trello for task management.

Like an MMORPG guild. which in 2024 means Discord.

(No “professional” solution is even close to gamer tech for remote communication)

Dailies (we have 3 in a week) for synchronization helps a lot. It’s also help’s with new stuff onboarding.

Slack, notion, and a meeting every Monday to talk about what we're doing and priorities.

Dumb idea: play some game together.

Tickets. Email. Signal (emergencies and sensitive info only).

Async all the things.

Keep devs out of meetings.

Don't track work hours.

Never do Slack/Teams unless a client pays a lot to suck you into that or if they pay a very large number to have your devs in it as well.

A few things help me:

Get used to the idea that someone isn’t necessarily there when you message. Try to predict when you’ll need to talk to someone and send the message with the info you need.

Document. Everything. Confluence needs to become your best friend. You and your colleagues rely on this information to keep up on things they might miss.

When you’re planning work, especially with lots of uncertainty, optimise to be inefficient. It’s better to start with 20-person calls at the start of a big project and cut them down later than to have 3-person calls and realise you missed critical people 2 weeks before your target date.

On the flip side, once you know what you’re doing, keep your status checks lean. Invite only the leads you need and write down the outcomes to share with the wider team.

Be willing to change your communication habits as you grow. A weekly all-hands is fine for a 10-person startup. It’s a monumental waste of time when you have 200 people across 5 departments.

Me personally:

- do my best to avoid chat stuff like Slack, yes even to ping someone before calling, it's more disturbing than useful. Mails are the way to go, much more structured so well searchable and reconstructable as needed, when needed. Doing so force people to communicate a bit more properly in written form instead of wasting time;

- a home office, meaning a room, with relevant environment (low noise, etc) to been able to talk out loud not having to wear headsets and alike, I do not care much if it's a VoIP phone classic call or something else, simply the point is being hands-free all the time, with good enough mic I can move a bit keep talking issueless;

- trying to keep a wiki, which is a VERY HARD task because when you start it's empty so there is no point in going there and after some times many pages became a bit or totally outdated and there is no easy way to bind them to what they document so to get "automatic alerts of not anymore current pages"... It's still useful because it's the sole document culture vs oral tradition enabler that most people know enough to casually use.

Aside an INTERNAL CRM-alike might be of help to being able to get some infos about a contact calling you every time he/she call (including personal stuff like birthdays who help socially).

Doing more often does not work. Most non-tech people still refuse the idea of tickets and tasks to be established/picked, assignments and reassignments rules etc try to push them outside very specific technical landscape in general is worse than giving up on them. Seriously.

That last paragraph is the biggest issue IMVHO: most tools we have are simply rigid and annoying, so most people use them badly nullifying any potentially positive outcome. To be short: more free text, more comms, less rules works regularly better, if you still manage to avoid exaggerations.

Onboarding is the hardest part: if normally docs are bad in general those to "get start with us" are the worse, essentially nonexistent or if present totally useless. In the end even in IT most people do not know how to work with IT tools and paradigm, and tend to be unwilling to learn.