Building culture within a remote company ?

I built a fully distributed team for my last startup and culture was a huge priority for us.

Here are a few tactical tips that we used.

1. Have a weekly video call with all team members. Ours was on Monday, scheduled at a time that worked for the majority of the team. We'd share weekend stories, share things about our lives, give tours of our houses, etc. The focus of the meeting was not about work, though work topics certainly did make it into the meeting.

2. Video calls for daily interactions and 1-1s. While we did use skype/hipchat/slack over the years, nothing beats video calls to make it more personal. Personally, I felt closer to people who I worked with remotely because of the conversations we had about our personal surrounds vs people I worked with in an office.

3. Communications throughout the day were mixed with work and fun topics. We never discovered people from having "water cooler" type discussions, unless of course they were offensive ( though I can't remember that ever being an issue ).

4. Team members shared if they were going out for a few hours or signing off for the day. We never had a rule about this, but it happened organically as people noticed others doing this.

5. You're allowed to call someone without scheduling a meeting. We wanted to emulate that office feeling of turning around to ask someone a question. If you didn't want to be disturbed, you'd use the chat client feature to say as much.

6. We only required 4 hours of overlap with other team members. Otherwise, employees were welcome to have completely flexible schedules.

7. When hiring, we looked for candidates who would thrive in a distributed environment. It was standard for us to ask candidates how they'd stay productive during the day at home. How they might remove distractions, etc.