Remote first: How to (coffee) chat?
First published at Wednesday, 4 November 2026
Remote first: How to (coffee) chat?
This is a blog article out of a series where I reflect on what I learned during funding, growing (, and selling) SaaS product companies. While I write those things down for myself, since I believe self-reflection helps me learn, I also want to share my thoughts with anybody who might be interested. An overview of all related topics can be found below. I have a bunch of these blog posts lined up, so you also might want to follow me if you like this one.
If you run a remote team, you will be told constantly that you have to engineer social connection, and there is a small industry of Slack bots and apps ready to sell you the cure. I went in believing some of this. This is what we tried and what it did, and the conclusion differs from what the tools are selling.
The four things we tried
We ran four approaches over the years, sometimes several at once.
Open office hours in gather.town, the spatial-office tool I have described before: a space you could drop into, see who was around, and start an unplanned conversation. A bot that paired people at random each week for a coffee chat. The same open-office-hours idea run through plain Google Meet links. And team-level coffee chats, scheduled and hosted by the engineering managers for their own teams.
The team-level chats worked for the most people. The random pairing and the open-ended drop-in spaces worked too, but for a narrower set.
What happened
The people who used these things were, overwhelmingly, the people who would have connected anyway. The mechanisms gave the socially-inclined more surface to be social on, and they took it. A set of people participated only at the team level, where there was a bit of structure and a familiar group. And some never really participated at all, beyond what their job required.
For a while I read that last group as a failure of the tooling, something I should fix with a better app or a cleverer format. Then I noticed it is exactly what an office looks like. Some people have a wide circle at work and some have almost none, and that was true in every office I have ever worked in, long before anyone was remote. Once you have set up a sensible baseline of opportunities, is there actually a remote-versus-office difference in who connects and who doesn't? In my experience, no. The distribution is the same. Remote did not break socialising; it just stopped hiding how much of it was always down to individual inclination. This is the same thing I admitted about myself in what sucks, where I said the scheduled virtual social does not work for me, and it is the same personality axis underneath self-direction.
The rule: it is an offer, never a metric
So here is the rule I landed on. A coffee-chat mechanism is never a management instrument. Do not measure participation, because the moment a connection becomes a number on a dashboard you have ruined the thing you were trying to encourage. Do not mandate it, because mandatory socialising is a contradiction. And do not rely on it for anything that has to happen, because you could never rely on spontaneous office socialising either.
The actual work of keeping a team aligned does not run on coffee chats. It runs on standups, synchronous or asynchronous, and on topic-focused, agenda-driven meetings, and those happen regardless of how social the team is. The coffee chats sit on top of that as an offer: here is the space and the opportunity, use it if it suits you. Make it easy and optional, and then let go of the outcome.
Summary
Engineered remote social mirrors office social almost exactly: it gives the people inclined to connect more room to do so, and it does not manufacture connection for those who are not. That was always true and is not a remote problem. Set up a sensible baseline of opportunities, never targets, keep your coordination on standups and focused meetings, and then stop managing it.
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