[greggarious]

Proactive. You're not having those serendipitous water cooler conversations, so you need to go out of your way to be proactive and think about what work should be done in the future, what issues may arise, and make decisions based on those projections.

This can take the form of brainstorming potential future features/issues, but it can also be as simple as trying to schedule quick 1:1s with coworkers to allow for unstructured verbal conversation.

(Personally I don't think Slack/IRC allow for the same sort of interaction as a verbal conversation)