Background: engineering manager of a team of 6 at a large tech company. 3 are located in one of our offices, 4 (myself included) are remote. > If you're in a r

Background: engineering manager of a team of 6 at a large tech company. 3 are located in one of our offices, 4 (myself included) are remote. > If you're in a remote team you know how difficult is to "connect" with other colleagues. Everybody is always in a hurry so there's no deeper synchronization. I'm not sure I agree with this premise. I don't think it's difficult as much as it just requires some explicit effort and habits. For example: - We have video standups over Zoom and ask people to turn on video as often as possible. This helps a ton IMO. It's tempting to just do async Slack standups (and we do on occasion) but it shouldn't be the norm. - Our broader group uses Tinypulse to send out weekly questions. Answers are anonymous. If the questions are good (ours are), you'll gain a lot of insight into how your team is feeling. I might learn, for example, that I'm not spending enough time with ICs discussing their career path or that people overall are pretty happy. - Weekly one-on-one's with my team. Again, over Zoom with video on. This is the best way I connect with my team and get at their emotional state. - Code reviews. We do them traditionally in GitHub (every PR requires 2 approvals) but we also have synchronous code review sessions 3x/week in Zoom. These are just 90min blocks on the calendar and attendance is optional. During these sessions, anyone can present a PR, walk us through the code and demonstrate the feature. We don't do pair programming but I think this approach is even more valuable. It has increased our velocity, reduced bus factor, and provided another form of "connection" for our team. - Every quarter we either do a team visit to the office or an offsite for our broader group. > In my team, we're doing a "check-in/out" inside each meeting where we take turns by answering "With what emotion you're entering/exiting this meeting?". To echo what others have said, this feels like a weird thing to do in a meeting. People already don't like being in meetings, so making them longer with this won't help. That's my 2¢. Again, maybe I'm just spoiled with a great team, but I would start with some of the basic things I've outlined above. YMMV.