How are you building culture and community in remote organizations?

I’ve been with the same large tech co since 2017, and several others before that. We went fully remote in March 2020, so now it’s been > 3 years. We’ve shipped stuff, hired people, re-orged, etc. But we really put very little effort into figuring out how to work well remotely. And it’s not really happening organically.

Work feels very transactional now. Collaboration between peers is at an all time low. Every new hire I’ve encountered since then has reported that they feel very little belonging within the company. How couldn’t they, a 15 minute virtual standup isn’t sufficient to building relationships.

We’ve tried a few things with varying degrees of success. My findings so far is that any sort of purely social gathering on zoom is just going to feel very forced. We’ve had a little better luck interlacing some social activities within a session where work content is the primary focus (“Tell us about your weekend” before standup updates, as a simple example) but it still feels like we can do more.

Anybody out there doing interesting things with remote community and culture building? Do share.