Ask HN: What do you do as Team Building while on remote?

We have daily coffee chat optional sessions right after standup.

So far it’s been working pretty great. Most days we have at least 4 or 5 folks stay. We talk about anything (but try not to talk about work)

We also occasionally play Among Us as a team. I’m not a gamer at all but have really enjoyed playing a social game together.

We've tried virtual "happy hours" and using a tool called Bagel to automate scheduling virtual "coffee breaks" between people and it's not really that great. If anything, it seems like more of an intrusion into my time or nuisance when I'm trying to finish work for the day.

We have also tried team "catch-ups" where our team gets on a call and tries to talk about non work things, but there's always one employee who's a bit too political that just derails the whole thing into political nonsense (I don't really identify with either party but to be transparent these are left leaning co-workers who feel it's necessary to complain about trump or how evil his supporters are).

Quite frankly, as someone who used to like being in an office, I'm starting to adapt to remote work and prefer it because I don't have to deal with social BS during the work day.

Building product. There has rarely been a more effective team building 'exercise' than getting something useful out.

Also, explaining your thinking. Being able to bring everyone from the objectives, back to how what you're doing fits into that is useful. People will be aligned, know where they're going, why they're doing what they're doing even at the task level.

It makes them much more independent because they have the logic you yourself used to make those decisions and can make many more on their own without your intervention, and if you intervene, it will start being on minor things and corrections because they get it right more often than not.

So, rationale out in the open do people can fork it and send in pull requests to your thinking, and adopt and improve it to make decisions and do useful things.

We have periodic calls where we discuss things that are holding us back, cool developments, etc.

I tend to be skeptical on team building, leadership, and what not as much as I was of self improvement. Not because the concepts themselves are bullshit, but because most content about it is bullshit. Those who are good at it seldom write, and those who write about it never accomplished anything in life other than writing about it.

Among Us games.

That's the honest truth :P