
Ask HN: What are some events that included remote employees that were successful - joshstrange
The company I work for has a number of remote employees and while I am on the development team the remote workers mainly consist of sales&#x2F;account managers. The company is looking for ways to involve them all more and specifically for events that we can all take part in together. I thought HN might be a great place to ask as there are a number of companies and people that work remotely here.<p>So, what events have you planned&#x2F;ran&#x2F;participated in remotely that you thought worked well?
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imsofuture
The best thing you can do is make your primary team-wide interactions remote
friendly. In fact, it's really the only thing you can do to make remote work
well! No matter where the employees are, even if they're all in the same
office, you should make decisions on Slack or Hangouts or Github or Jira or
whatever. Not just that, but you should have fun in those same places, that
should be your water cooler for casual social interaction. I'll assume that
you're doing that already, but if you aren't, no event(s) will make up for it.

One company that I worked for had an annual party, and many of the remote
employees made an effort to visit one of the two offices. The two offices then
established a live-stream back and forth during the party. Remote people that
didn't attend in person could stop by the streams, but that was probably only
fun for a few moments.

Offering (not requiring) a largely socially driven (instead of work driven)
trip once or more a year is probably a good idea, especially if you have some
sort of annual event to center it around like a holiday party.

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joshstrange
Thanks for the suggestions! We already make use of HipChat as much as possible
but since these aren't developers by and large that are remote they haven't
been as quick on the uptake.

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auganov
What are your other communication channels? If they're getting all the info
they need from somewhere else then there's no real incentive to adopt HipChat.

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exolymph
My company's HQ is in New York, and I'm located in SF (along with two others).
All the reporters did a team lunch via video chat. It wasn't as good as being
there in person, but it was fun to have some facetime to joke around with
people I normally only talk to on Slack.

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erik998
You can hit up an arcade or gaming place during the day and play against each
other.

[https://playlivenation.com/](https://playlivenation.com/)

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zer00eyz
Really any sort of online game that prompts interaction that isn't about work
and can't be turned to work is good.

I have made plenty of friends and great relationships with folks that I have
gamed with, some of us even email still to this day even though we no longer
play the same games.

Honestly... your on to something here the bigger question is what can you get
every one to play!

