We have a 40% remote staff at DigitalOcean. So this is really important to us. Initially, they come to the office for 1-2 weeks when they first start to get fac

We have a 40% remote staff at DigitalOcean. So this is really important to us. Initially, they come to the office for 1-2 weeks when they first start to get face to face introductions with everyone on their team and as much of the company as possible. Part of our standard onboarding is for each manager to take them out to lunch and to host a team event while they are in town. This is social time to get to know them on a personal level. We conduct a remote-exclusive on boarding for an hour to provide them with key tips on being remote and how to be a successful remote at DigitalOcean. This includes booking travel in the future, expensing items when in town, information about corporate apartments, and an introduction to our people team Remote Point of Contact. After they return home with a better sense of the role and company they just started for, the full “remote” experience starts. We have a slack channel that our remotees “hang out” in all day. They created a weather bot to share their local weather, greet each other with a “good morning” and continue on to chat all day as if they were next to each other in a space. This is actually my favorite channel on slack because it encompasses all the random water cooler conversations around the office into 1 area. We do a lot for our employees in house and remote. The key is to not make our remote staff feel like they were a second thought. For example, we had a large company Thanksgiving dinner in November so we sent Thanksgiving pies to all of our remote staff. They received it right around the same time we were all going out to eat. We had a holiday dance party, so we sent our remotes speakers in the shape of droplets (which is our product here). We went to Tribeca Film Festival at HQ, so we sent each remote a box of movie candy and gift cards to the movie theater for them AND their families. We have built our current office space to be as remote friendly as possible. We integrated Google Chromebox for meetings in every conference room and telephone room. This prevents about 5 minutes of initial setup for microphone and camera. We have already invested in, and continue to invest in, state of the art technology for our All Hands Meetings. Proper microphones, speakers, and cameras in our “Atlantis”. Once all presentations are are complete, we switch to the camera view so we can see all of our remotes in the room with us as we continue through our AMA portion. These are just the baseline of things that we have done to make our remotes feel connected even when they are not in our office. We continue to upgrade the experience often and are continuing to grow our remote staff Internationally.