Like a lot of teams, we went from mostly in-office to fully remote within about a week this spring, with no real transition plan beyond "figure it out." Several months in, it is worth writing down what actually changed.
Our daily standup, which used to be a loose five minutes around a whiteboard, needed real structure once it moved to video — a shared agenda doc and a hard time limit, or it would sprawl. Code review got slower at first, since a quick "hey, can you look at this" across the office became an async Slack message that might sit for an hour, so we started scheduling short, dedicated review blocks rather than relying on ambient availability.
Somewhat to our surprise, our documentation quality improved. When you cannot lean over someone's desk to ask a quick question, you write things down more carefully the first time, and that habit has outlasted the initial adjustment period. Not everything about remote work has been an improvement, but that particular side effect has been a genuine and lasting one.
What we tried that did not work
Not every remote adaptation was a success. We initially tried replicating our in-office standup format exactly over video, keeping it unstructured and open-ended, and it sprawled well past its old five-minute length almost immediately without the natural social cues of an in-person room to keep it moving. Only after we imposed real structure — a shared written agenda and a hard time limit enforced by whoever is running that day's standup — did it settle back down to something closer to its original length.
Onboarding a new hire without ever meeting them in person
We hired one new developer fully during this remote period, someone who did not meet a single teammate in person before their first day. Onboarding leaned much more heavily on the written documentation habits mentioned above than any previous hire's onboarding had, and while it was not without some early friction — a few questions that would have been a quick verbal exchange in an office took longer to resolve asynchronously — the new hire was fully productive within roughly the same timeframe as our pre-remote hires, which we did not take for granted going in.
What we expect to keep even after offices reopen
Even once in-person work becomes an option again, we expect the improved documentation habits and the more deliberately scheduled code review blocks to stick around, since both turned out to be genuine improvements independent of the remote-work context that originally forced them, rather than compromises we are only tolerating until we can go back to the old way of doing things.