Including a remote team in decisions means designing the moments they can show up

The advice I gave on LinkedIn: “Keeping our remote software engineering team engaged in decision-making significantly enhances their morale and productivity. I’ve found that holding regular video meetings each week, with everyone encouraged to participate with their cameras on, really helps create a sense of connection. For those who can’t join group meetings due to time zone differences, conducting regular 1-on-1 sessions is a great way to have more personal conversations and provide the support they need without feelings of isolation.”

I’d give that advice again. But notice the quiet tension between its two halves — that’s the part worth sitting with.

Synchronous video, cameras on, is genuinely the best tool for connection. You see faces, you read the room, people feel seen. The problem is that the same tool is exclusionary by design: every decision made live in a meeting is a decision made without whoever couldn’t be in that meeting. On a distributed team, that’s not an occasional miss — it’s a structural one, and it lands on the same people every time, the ones furthest from the home time zone.

So the 1-on-1 isn’t a consolation prize for the time-shifted; it’s an acknowledgment that presence has to be designed, not assumed. But even that leans synchronous. The piece I’d add now is that inclusion in decisions specifically needs an asynchronous spine — decisions written down where they’re made, with a window to weigh in before they harden — so that being asleep during the meeting doesn’t mean being absent from the choice.

The connection problem and the inclusion problem feel like the same problem, but they’re not. Connection wants everyone in the room. Inclusion wants the decision to survive nobody being in the room. A remote team needs both, and the mistake is solving the first and assuming you’ve solved the second.