[mawburn]

Well, we went through the transition at my last job so I kind of have some incite. We had 3 or 4 people on my project who had came over from Invision, who are a fully remote company and I have a good friends at other well known fully remote companies that I gleamed things from to help us transition from 0 remote company to a fully remote project team (50ppl-ish).

1. Every meeting should be video first. Going without video should be extraordinarily rare. Even if that's just an impromptu meeting with 2 or 3 people. Kill conference phones completely. Get used to screen sharing. Good reliable tools like Zoom are invaluable. You miss a lot from body language and facial expressions if you use audio only, which will fix your major issue. It also makes people feel more included and that the people working somewhere else are actually real people and not just voices. Make good use of Slack video

2. Every meeting should be able to be taken as remote, even if that means just from your desk (or personal meeting room if you're in an open office). This means that the people who are in a conference room must be on video with an open mic, unless there is uncontrollable excessive background noise or something. No cross the table talk on mute.

3. Don't be afraid to make temp rooms with multiple people when you have conversations on Slack (or whatever you use), it'll help more people get involved as if you were talking at someone's desk.

The first 2 things are extremely important. Invision has recently released some blogs about cultivating a good remote culture that are pretty good. I don't have any links handy, however but it's worth a look if you're interested.