Exactly, from what I have seen gitlab seems to have this figured out very well. From what I remember they have slack groups and video calls where employees can have casual talk about non work things so they can get to know each other better. I can't see this happening at my company if one person went remote. The most I can see happening is someone doing remote once a week so they catch up on the rest of the days and spend one day focused alone.
That's right. GitLab has Group Conversations [1] every day at the time when West Coast and Europe overlap. The most-wanted hours in the company to organize meetings are dedicated to talking about different areas of the company and learning how they're performing. We also do a Company Call [2] every day, which comprises about five minutes of announcements and 25 minutes of people chatting.
Our Coffee Break Calls encourage team members to spend several hours a week socializing and building a relationship that's separate from work. Since working remotely can also lead to team members never meeting in person, we have a visiting grant [3] to cover transportation costs, and every nine months, the entire team gets together for the GitLab Contribute (ex Summit) [4]. The next Contribute happens in less than a 10 days and I can't wait for it!
At my previous job, I worked 3 days in, 2 days out, as the only remote person on the floor. I didn't have any project-related problems because of that, and while we already used in-room group chat for some percentage of conversations (both work and non-work), this was never 100%, so I felt incredibly out-of-the-loop on office banter. Not the worst thing in life, but it made me feel a bit like an outsider. Now I'm contracting and collaborating with other remote people, so things are much better.
