[brainfish]

As an eng mgr of a fully remote team, I do not agree with your assertion that "relationships cannot be made via zoom." Of the sixteen people I work closely with, I have met fewer than half in person, including a similar fraction of the engineers reporting to me. I seek to balance the lack of in-person interactions by leaning heavily into interest, compassion, and vulnerability. I take time in my 1:1s to ask about folks' lives, making sure to remember past details they have shared and to make it clear that I am generally interested in everything they have to share about themselves. But I think more importantly, I am conscientiously more vulnerable in my own sharing with those who take an interest than I might be otherwise. I put a little extra effort into "broadcasting" my interest in my colleagues as humans to make sure some of that truth makes it over the wire. The result is that I have very real human connections with nearly all of them, and the engineers on my team have stuck with me through some crazy s** that I don't think they all would have had it not been for those connections.

It's easy to get into a work mindset when using work tools. That can in turn cause us to skip those human interactions such as more personal conversations that might usually happen at lunch or whatever. Taking the time to elicit them, where natural, without the natural cues is hugely important. I have honestly never felt more connected with a team than I do with my current one, which was formed almost entirely post-pandemic. Hell, folks were building real human relationships with just pen and paper for ages not long ago. It can absolutely be done.

[mtpockets]

Managers like ourselves make the mistake thinking our close relationships with our folks means the relationship between our folks and others are equally close. That is because as managers people publish their info to us and are incentivized to do so where as two peers are not. And in large orgs, how do you gain visibility as an IC or build good professional connections or connect multiple young engineers together, the introvert to other introverts? To replace in office collisions at lunch or at the vending machine is equivalent to finding and randomly zooming folks in chat groups which is hard since calendars are hard to get on. Lots of friction.

But I speak of large orgs here, not 100 person startup where some of these things can be more easily managed… but still I know these companies do a lot of offsites to make up for the lack of connection in office.