This above all else. I've seen an entire remote office fall apart because of an over-reliance on slack. - Text doesn't convey emotion, so one person's joke of

This above all else. I've seen an entire remote office fall apart because of an over-reliance on slack. - Text doesn't convey emotion, so one person's joke often gets misinterpreted as another's jab - Text is low-bandwidth and asynchronous. When those two pair together, you get people writing novels back and forth over the entire day when it could have been a 15 min chat - Text makes it hard to empathize, which means it's really easy to soapbox and grandstand, which makes conversations very unpleasant and brings out the worst in people. What works is limiting text communication and actively encouraging video chat. A peer review can have a comment, response, and rebuttal, but anything further should be done over video. Encourage "office hours" for knowledge transfer or "why is this done like this" type questions. Find ways of minimizing friction for video chat -- if it can be done casually it will be used more frequently.