Remote Workers Fire Up the Grill on Friday Afternoons

Now that I have your attention…

I manage a team of almost 10 analytics engineers and data engineers at Unnest, a data consulting firm that’s been remote-first since day one.

When I started managing remotely, I looked for real, practical insights on how to do it well. I didn’t find much. So here’s what I actually learned over three years — maybe it’ll help someone.

1. Your team is not taking breaks — and AI is making it worse

Here’s the most counterintuitive thing about remote work: people assume remote workers have it easy — more relaxed, fewer hours, half the effort. The reality is the opposite. Remote work removes the natural rhythm that forces you to stop. (I know — a few CAC40 CEOs just had a heart attack reading that remote workers might actually work too much instead of firing up barbecues on Friday afternoons.)

In an office, you bump into someone at the coffee machine. You walk to a meeting room. You overhear a conversation and join in. None of this happens at home. Your desk is always right there. Your Slack is always pinging. And there’s no social cue telling you it’s OK to take a break.

Now add LLMs to the mix — Claude, ChatGPT, Codex — and things get even lonelier. The last organic reason people had to reach out to a colleague was to ask “hey, how would you handle this?” Now they ask an AI and go on to the next task.

2. Use a virtual office

The first time I opened Gather, I wasn’t skeptical — I was home. Tiny avatars walking around a pixelated floor plan? That’s A Link to the Past. That’s the countless hours I poured into RPG Maker building games that never got released. I loved it immediately.

And it works — not through forced interactions, but through ambient awareness. You see who’s talking with who in a meeting room. You can walk up to someone and talk. It recreates the one thing remote work kills: the feeling that you’re not alone. You can also customize the office and make it feel like it’s truly yours — ours has a cemetery for employees who sadly quit the company. It’s home.

Gather 2.0 pushed it further with collective pomodoros and interactive games. At launch, you could even hear all discussions by default from people around you as if you were in the same open space. They quickly deactivated this default feature for obvious bitching reasons.

Honestly, I would even argue it gives some of the benefits from office life without the disadvantages (like the CFO sitting on your lap until you give them their Excel export).

3. Create rituals — and put them on the calendar

Remote-first without rituals is just a group of freelancers with the same Slack workspace.

We have a morning coffee at 9 a.m., an afternoon break, weekly demos, impromptu meetings to unblock colleagues who are stuck. None of this is revolutionary. All of it is essential. In a remote setup, if you don’t create the moment, it doesn’t exist. It feels weird at first. Then it becomes culture.

Put all of it in everyone’s calendars. If it’s not on the calendar, people won’t show up.

4. Turn your camera on

Stupid simple, but it needs to be said. In companies where Teams is the default, I see more avatars and initials than actual faces.

If you want your team to feel like a team, people need to see faces. It’s the bare minimum. It also lets you read facial cues — how people react to things, whether they’re actually listening. I can guarantee you those 30 people in a Teams call with their cameras off are reading articles about who got kicked out of Dancing with the Stars or Top Chef last night.

5. Physical gatherings are better than daily office life

Our in-person time together is higher quality than what most office teams experience.

In a traditional office, seeing your colleagues is routine, mundane, sometimes draining. At Unnest, we do two seminars a year and gather the whole company each quarter in Paris for a few days. We go to great locations. We eat great food. I run one-shot D&D adventures where my team gets devoured by Purple Worms. By seeing each other less, we end up having better moments together. Every gathering is an event, not a Tuesday.

6. Notion is your long-term memory

Anything that needs to exist beyond today lives in Notion. It’s our single source of truth — the central operating system for the entire team. And in a remote-first company, it’s what makes async work actually work. When people are spread across different schedules, locations, and time slots, you can’t rely on “I’ll just ask them tomorrow.”

We track everything in databases: projects with their status, ownership, timelines, and client info. Tasks with assignments, deadlines, and dependencies. Decisions and ADRs — what was decided, why, and by whom. Meeting notes. Deliverables and documentation. Team processes, runbooks, how-tos.

7. Slack is your short-term memory

Quick questions, daily coordination, real-time unblocking. Anything that expires in 48 hours belongs here.

But Slack can become a nightmare fast if you don’t set rules. Ours are simple: no private messages for work topics. If something concerns multiple people, say it once in a channel — don’t send the same message to five people separately. Create dedicated channels per subject, keep team channels for chatter, and use threads religiously. On that threads rule, if anyone from my team reads this, I apologize. I do flood in threads, and outside of threads.

Anyway, stop putting long-term knowledge in Slack threads that will be buried by Friday.

8. Hire for autonomy

Remote-first is harder with junior profiles, full stop. At Unnest, we deliberately hire experienced people who already know how to work independently. It’s a deliberate choice. If your management model relies on someone being able to tap a colleague’s shoulder, remote-first will break it.

9. Do weekly 1-to-1s

In an office, you can feel the room. Remotely, you can’t. So I do weekly 1-to-1s with every team member.

Two parts: a structured check — how’s the utilization, any blockers, any critical updates — and then an open conversation about what’s impacting them, positively or negatively. Everything gets tracked in Notion with quick buttons to create tasks straight from the 1-to-1. That way, actions are not lost in last week’s note.

10. Go fishing

This is the most important lesson, and the one that took me the longest to learn.

People won’t tell you what’s on their mind. Not proactively. Not all of them. In an office, you might catch a sigh, a look, someone being unusually quiet. Remotely, you get nothing unless you go looking for it.

So you have to go fishing. Ask the questions nobody’s asking. Create space for the things people hesitate to say. If you wait for people to come to you, you’ll only hear from the loud ones. And by the time the quiet ones speak up, it’s usually too late.

Anyway, it’s Friday, and it’s noon, and I’m working in a full remote position, so I’ll leave it at that.