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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

> Talk with people about more than work. Connect and develop relationships. Work toward a true culture that exemplifies what the company stands for both internally and externally, and make it meaningful to everyone involved.

So, what, people can't do this type of stuff online? The remote team I work with hangs out on internet chat all day long, every work day. We talk about plenty beyond work related stuff. We even post messages over the weekend. We care about each other and our personal lives and have a very cohesive team. Again, this is ebooks vs. paper books. People have a romantic notion about what true interpersonal communication is supposed to be, but when it comes down to it there's no reason why one method of communication is inherently better than any other.

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The one big difference I have found isn't about communicating with your team, but that when you are actually at the office you spend a lot more time talking to people not on your team or in your department. People with entirely different backgrounds and working on entirely different projects.

This can lead to new and creative developments and projects that would never happen from simply talking to people on your team. These projects have, at least for me, often been the most fun and challenging (and profitable) project I've been involved in.

Again, this could happen online just as effectively. But even so, this is fairly obscure benefit to working on-site.

I tried to propose an idea where I work of having a threaded chat room to mimic conversations in the hall. It could get even better by having some intelligent gleaning of conversation keywords and showing those visibly by each chat room, so people know when their ears should be tingling and can join in on the conversation.

The method of a single chat room means multiple crossing conversations become hard and there's constant distraction trying to see what people are talking about only to find it's not interesting to you.

The product I work on is called http://kona.com and we use it to collaborate online. It allows us to have multiple chat rooms going on at the same time for one team that are separated out by topic. We have discussions both dedicated to work topics and non-work topics. It simulates the "water cooler effect" quite nicely.

In my experience, relationships grow proportionally with the time and energy you commit to them.

There is no reason that can't be done remotely, and surely people are getting better at it with current technology. But it is decidedly more difficult, in my experience, than a physical presence, and you may not realize what might be missing.

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