[snarf21]

Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual.

Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.

[ghaff]

I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often.

To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good for some things though a lot of people I work with don't use them. I've yet to see anything that remotely compares to being together in a conference room for high bandwidth interactions.

[mjevans]

Or you need to get everyone hanging out in a group chatter environment (Like IRC).

[ghaff]

Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.

[konschubert]

I think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...

[douche]

That sounds just awful. Maybe I'm spoiled, but even when I'm at work, I go in my office and close the door when I actually have work to do. Trying to work in that kind of a panopticon style environment sounds nerve-wracking.

[pdimitar]

That sounds like a modernized version of the guy with the lash monitoring if the slaves work constantly. Like really, there are people who find that managerial technique desirable? Wow.

[ajmurmann]

I've tried this on a team that was mostly remote but on certain days located in there regional offices. It didn't really help with anything. The only conversations that took place were conversations that otherwise would have happened anyway but would have been initiated on chat and then taken to video. The only difference was that now someone walked up to an iPad and started asking loudly if the person they want to talk to is available.