Sure but at the same time, building a baseline relationships with people is important. It builds capital that can be used to diffuse misunderstandings and tense situations.

I'm not looking to replace my family with my co-workers but instead enabling them to get to know each other and connect a bit more.

I second this. Building relationships with your co-workers that includes non-work contexts gives you more background to understand their motivations, and they yours. As as side benefit it can pay off as a great friendship that extends past the time when professionally speaking you go your separate ways. Five of my favorite friends are ex-coworkers.

Part of building relationships from a management perspective means understanding how people operate, and then helping to create an environment that’s conducive to them. Your responses in this thread read like you expect everyone you work with to instead meet you on your level. That’s great when everyone is like minded, but as teams scale up it doesn’t work that way.

I also have many ex-coworkers who are great friends. I have others who are doing great and I only see random updates on LinkedIn every few years as they move around. Both are fine, both sets of people were awesome hires (on a remote team)

I'll think about that, though I definitely don't expect teams to meet me on my level. I mean if you read my comments on this thread I talk about my failures, not expectations that others failed to meet. If I make the mistake of joining a team whose level I can't meet then it's my mistake and I leave with as little disruption as possible.

But, it's also okay to be friendly with people you see every day, and whose patience, generosity, insight, and attention you rely to do your work. So, the question is a valid one: how best to strengthen those necessary relationships in a remote environment?

I'm gonna second this. "Company Culture" is mostly an attempt to get people more invested in the workplace than they should be, trying to replace their workers' social lives and family lives with work instead by making work seem more appealing.

Remote first companies are great precisely because it cuts away all of this bullshit. Work stays work, and "company culture" stays out of your personal time and personal life.

I managed a person who believed that. It was a nightmare. Oh they work all the time, more than they should, because they believe in what the company's doing. But man I completely failed making any sort of connection that allowed us to understand each other (and therefore work well together).

Maybe it depends on the company though. This is a 100 person boot-strapped open source company that has a strong mission. Maybe if you're working for a 10,000 person public entity where everybody's just another cog the whole "culture" thing is just a veiled attempt to make the company your life.

Some people do not want to have a social or personal connection with their colleagues. But they still want a deep connection, and they look for that through the work itself. By doing it together, by talking about it, and by talking about the process behind the work, and the big ideas they have about all that.

But if they get matched with a colleague who wants to build a connection by getting to know the person beyond that, then that doesn't work well.

true

Yes company culture can be gamed and abused, but this isn't always the case. Having a workplace that recognizes important life events (like the birth of a child) is meaningful to the individuals on a human level. We can't write that all off as corporate big brother trying to control us.

Ultimately we are all people working with other people, and a business can do quite a bit to help us recognize each other as humans.

Yeah, don't try to make your employees be friends and family.

HOWEVER, you can still build the "work friend" camaraderie through some specific things.

For example, get together at least once a year, maybe more often for "in-person sessions" - if you have no main office just rent a room or two from a hotel and have everyone stay on premises, pay for lunch and dinner, etc. Don't force everyone to go to dinner together, but do have one nice staff dinner.

Always be late to staff meetings, give people time to chat before the meeting begins. Up to you if this is explicit or not.

Don't record everything.

It depends, in your company you can find good friends when your topics of interest and ethics are the same. I personally find more commonalities in a company that in the university or high school.

I’ll agree with this except that if this is your attitude you shouldn’t expect to enjoy working at a company that does value co-workers talking about non-work things. Some companies don’t think it’s OK to only do work things at work and it sounds like the OP prefers to work at a company like that.