Here at Aula (35-person remote-first startup building a ‘Slack for education’), we’ve done the following:

1. Dedicate sync time to the stuff that’s otherwise hard to do such as relationship building - ‘remote coffees’, an onboarding focused on getting under the skin of each other. Wholesome stuff. 2. Your post mentions ‘protocols for communication’. We’ve engineered templates for all team meetings to direct the conversation towards the topics we think matters the most. 3. Documentation is needed in an async workplace; if you encourage commenting on/challenging everything, you foster an ‘always in beta’ culture where everyone can make edits.

We’re still working on building a culture where remote team members proactively reach out to each other to ‘hang out’ on video calls if they feel socially under stimulated.

Has anyone solved that?

How has your company built a good remote/distributed culture? And where has it failed?