You've hit upon the key point that many remote workers neglect. It doesn't hurt, and oftentimes greatly helps, to consciously make the extra effort to relentlessly, while appropriately, seek out moments for personal bonding time between team members. Remote staff may need to take this to gentle professional extremes to glean tidbits of personal information on their teammates (i.e. small talk).
Examples:
- Few minutes early to conference calls? Don't always let the line remain silent.
- Schedule formal 1-1 calls and purposely build in some "meandering" time into the agenda (especially for managers of any team who should be scheduling 1-1s with their directs anyway on some cadence).
- Jump on rare lulls, pauses or other appropriate moments during phone calls or IM chat conversational flows.
- Reach out and IM somebody during a known break period (admittedly, this has a low success rate for me due to differing timezones).
Remote staff are starved for information about their teammates. Some remote staff don't care. Others are clueless, in which case they should be classified as-such and you may adapt your style of interaction. From my personal experience[NB] managing remote technical consulting teams, most people do in fact crave more personal connections across teams, but they need to make continuous, concerted (and sometimes disconcertingly) conscious effort.
This type of cognitive overhead is fair to classify as "extraneous" and "bothersome" by certain people, and some extreme cases of successful remote teams (examples: interacting almost entirely via mailing lists, high ratio of long form vs. short emails) do not seem to maintain or require this overhead.
However, for the rest of us working in 99% of other organizations, remote staff can generate the same type of buzz, high-energy and high-performing team outcomes that Dr. Pentland studied, iff the remote team members are collectively willing to build personal relationships with each other.
[NB] Anecdata trigger warning