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Ask HN: What are some events that included remote employees that were successful

7 points by joshstrange ↗ HN
The company I work for has a number of remote employees and while I am on the development team the remote workers mainly consist of sales/account managers. The company is looking for ways to involve them all more and specifically for events that we can all take part in together. I thought HN might be a great place to ask as there are a number of companies and people that work remotely here.

So, what events have you planned/ran/participated in remotely that you thought worked well?

6 comments

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exolymph
My company's HQ is in New York, and I'm located in SF (along with two others). All the reporters did a team lunch via video chat. It wasn't as good as being there in person, but it was fun to have some facetime to joke around with people I normally only talk to on Slack.
erik998
You can hit up an arcade or gaming place during the day and play against each other.

https://playlivenation.com/

zer00eyz
Really any sort of online game that prompts interaction that isn't about work and can't be turned to work is good.

I have made plenty of friends and great relationships with folks that I have gamed with, some of us even email still to this day even though we no longer play the same games.

Honestly... your on to something here the bigger question is what can you get every one to play!

imsofuture
The best thing you can do is make your primary team-wide interactions remote friendly. In fact, it's really the only thing you can do to make remote work well! No matter where the employees are, even if they're all in the same office, you should make decisions on Slack or Hangouts or Github or Jira or whatever. Not just that, but you should have fun in those same places, that should be your water cooler for casual social interaction. I'll assume that you're doing that already, but if you aren't, no event(s) will make up for it.

One company that I worked for had an annual party, and many of the remote employees made an effort to visit one of the two offices. The two offices then established a live-stream back and forth during the party. Remote people that didn't attend in person could stop by the streams, but that was probably only fun for a few moments.

Offering (not requiring) a largely socially driven (instead of work driven) trip once or more a year is probably a good idea, especially if you have some sort of annual event to center it around like a holiday party.

joshstrange
Thanks for the suggestions! We already make use of HipChat as much as possible but since these aren't developers by and large that are remote they haven't been as quick on the uptake.
auganov
What are your other communication channels? If they're getting all the info they need from somewhere else then there's no real incentive to adopt HipChat.