Some things we have been trying and are working: - Daily online coffee meetings (random talk, not work-focused) - Internal fast talks about some random piece of knowledge/technology.
Any other ideas?
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.
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.
That's the honest truth :P