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My company also has group testing every week where everyone hops on a call and chats while playing with the new build.
For everything else I let grownups (employees) decide if they want to mingle with others on and off work, either in person or over Zoom.
GitLab is great at remote first culture. Check out their open source company handbook. Remote first requires proactive process to keep employees engaged and communicating effectively. If you feel isolated and trapped in a silo, good process can pull you out. Also, look for companies where remote strategy emanates from the senior leadership. A CEO that flows down remote strategy will be more effective.
Work/company culture is overrated in my opinion. That's why I don't do anything special apart from regular catchups and being nice along with trying to get better paycheck and titles for people reporting to me. For everything else I let grownups (employees) decide if they want to mingle with others on and off work, either in person or over Zoom.
People like to think of our work selves as these alter egos we take off when we go home from work. Life is more nuanced than that. If you've got a stressful job that stress is going to bleed into your personal life.
We’re getting there, I’ve been in your spot and have some tips after fighting for a better remote culture for months: 1. In-person events must happen. Best case scenario, once per quarter. Even once per year is phenomenal though. This will put out a lot of remote culture failure fires. 2. Team-only social hour with games, works much better after an in person event. 3. My newest experiment win: opening up a casual zoo…
This sounds pretty terrible environmentally, as remote-first implies geographically distributed, which implies air travel with its associated externalities.
One of the tradeoffs with remote work is flexibility for closer connections. You can work fight this somewhat, but it's the wrong work model for cultural cohesion.
If you want to talk about non work things, find people who aren't your co-workers. It's OK to only do work things at work, and to separate personal and professional life.
I'm gonna second this. "Company Culture" is mostly an attempt to get people more invested in the workplace than they should be, trying to replace their workers' social lives and family lives with work instead by making work seem more appealing. Remote first companies are great precisely because it cuts away all of this bullshit. Work stays work, and "company culture" stays out of your personal time and personal life.
Ultimately we are all people working with other people, and a business can do quite a bit to help us recognize each other as humans.
I've got better friends and more in common with people on a remote team than I ever had in an office day in day out. Depends on the people. Culcural cohesion feels like some bs term to keep managers relevant.