Not discounting this, but i Free-form 1:1's always have an aura of being more "improvisational" and in the moment. Good 1:1's are supposed to be semi-structured (ie not 'free form'). A shared journal, a retro exercise, etc. I have not had the experience that these build trust. Good team work, and delivering high quality work towards a common goal do that. You popping by for a 3 minute conversation in ear shot of 5 other people trying to do their work doesn't.

It may FEEL like it because those people chatting get energy from it. But it doesn't. If you need energy from people like this it's 100% a good idea. Go nuts. Personally I think people over index on this because they have no idea how to structure async team comms.

– Videos – Longform content – Team agreements to respond to things async without x-hours – Team collaboration spaces – Good sprint ceremonies like refinement – Team QA-type exercises

Ad hoc conversations also contribute immensely to what I call "comms debt". The jolt of energy you get from water cooler talk last 3 minutes, and excluded anyone not in direct proximity. If the best idea was in the head of somebody 3 rooms away you have no way of knowing it. Add dozens of these micro-interactions throughout the day and it's a recipe for comms breakdown and kliqish behaviour.

I see this a lot in User Research. Let's "get out of the building" and talk to people. A good idea in practice, but without actual goals or hypothesis product leaders mistake the first 5 opinions they collected as fact — often cherry picking sound bytes that fit right in with their own biases (and I've seen this A LOT in older leaders). This is mistaken as research. But they love it because it has that face to face energy. The feeling makes it right, regardless of the evidence.

Trust in a team is based on good communication — and an agreement on what you expect from it. If someone posts a video to Slack do people respond? Do you have ceremonies to build togetherness and understanding? All of these things are somewhat easier when you just have to deal with Zoom logistics.

Anyone who has to clean up and index the deluge of Design Sprint whiteboard stickies knows what I'm talking about. Put that shit in Miro, thanks.

I think I've been unclear on the problem. Trust inside a single team is not something I've found to be a major problem, but between teams. Let's be more concrete:

I need to build trust between between 6 EMs spread over three different directors and 2 vps + some very senior engineers. I need to do this so that we can solve one of the larger problems the business is facing. Most of these people have no good reason to talk to each other (or me) regularly. Without trust, one or more of these people will likely torpedo the proposal in order to avoid tying themselves to other teams and people they don't know.

Pre-covid the solution to this problem was (mostly) chatting over lunch. You'd get the right people talking, seed the idea, and build up to a proposal that everyone could agree to drive forward. IME this whole style of consensus building is dead in a remote world because async communication is too low bandwidth for trust building.

This makes it really hard to take good organizational bets, you have to wait till you have a mountain of data and customer feedback before you can sell big projects. The quality of the company's output really noticeably declines from this.

> Pre-covid the solution to this problem was (mostly) chatting over lunch.

Except that Pre-Covid, those [6 EMs spread over three different directors and 2 vps + some very senior engineers] were already probably not at the same office.

They were spread across three states, two countries, and one was a consultant from India.

This was my experience with any company bigger than about 40 people, anyways.

Maybe part of the problem is a lot of orgs are watching(and logging) your remote conversations with an all seeing eye. But they're not necessarily bugging your in person office?

Not sure if this would work for you, but I tend to have ad-hoc, 1on1 video calls with people.

If you are not doing deep work, it's no biggie.

I also would schedule 1on1 meetings to 'catch-up' (not too many of them, but ...)

Don't get me wrong, meeting some of these people in person is great, but I have several great relationships at work where we've never met in person

I like the concept of water-cooler -- an always on zoom meeting that you can choose to join... Or not. It's up to you whether you hop in.

Your reward for being willing is exactly this spontaneity that is missing from remote work. I have seen it work again and again...!