Yeah. Remote is fine but you need to budget time and money for plane tickets and hotels. That's been the tough thing for me the past year. I'm normally remote although I could go into an office--and am technically assigned to one but I normally travel to a lot of events as well as off-sites.
>Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible.
Yep. I sometimes hear people talking about how we should have team building events on the weekend. That's a big nope. In fact, while it's sometimes unavoidable, I sort of resent it when I need to travel on a Sunday to get to some event/meeting.
Some people handle remote communications just fine. Others were raised on a steady diet of internet flame wars and approach the screen names in their company chat the same way: As enemies to argue with every day.
Putting people in front of each other associates a real person with that screen name. Everyone starts treating each other better and working more cooperatively. The transformation is almost instant.
One important tip: Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible. Avoid anything on weekends or after hours as much as possible. You don’t want the team building to be an extra ask on top of their normal workload. It is their workload. Obviously flights and hotel stays must be an exception, but keep it in bounds of normal working hours as much as possible.