It's unpopular with some people, but pair programming can work very well for this, even remote. I'm a hands-on manager, and through spontaneous conversations du

It's unpopular with some people, but pair programming can work very well for this, even remote. I'm a hands-on manager, and through spontaneous conversations during pairing sessions, my team has learned about things like Agile development (in the real "you discover, learn, iterate the product" sense, not the pseudo-junk that gets peddled many places). On my ideal team, we would have 3 hours per week of meetings and 37 hours of coding. I've done this and seen it work, with stakeholders at the director levels thrilled by our success. We essentially organize around a set of shared values, and team members explain back to me our practices and why we do them clearly with examples, so I know they really get it and actually buy in without me having to force it. This has resulted in great team morale, because everyone feels like they have a stake and a say in our processes. The most consistent feedback I hear is "when I leave to deal with personal life issues or just to take a break, I never worry that I'll be missed. The team keeps going without a hiccup because our processes are so good."