In Scandinavia I feel that there's a pretty distinct border between work and friends/social life. Socialising with colleagues is usually pretty superficial like afterwork and such.
Maybe this is the reason I find these "water-cooler moments" so vague and overrated. Personally I think I derive a good and rewarding working relationship by basically just working together, even if that would be mainly through text. I do however realise that there's a lot of people - in my current on-site job as well - that really avoids communicating through text if it's possible to talk face-to-face. I'd assume these persons would probably not enjoy working remotely.
I hope remote-only companies make sure that new hires actually can, and like to, communicate through text.
1. Daily call with everyone where we talk about our private lives for the most part (30m call, 28m private life talk: everyone has to tell something they did for fun last week)
2. Very active chat, with many non-work channels
3. A 'watercooler' hangout, where people join to just casually talk over video chat
If everything is fine, I don't talk much "privately" with people at work and some "more social" individuals talk about their private things, when "at the cooler".
If there are problems in management, we talk about these "at the cooler".
I never really got along with people that I was "forced" to be together with. School, University, Work. I mean, people liked to work with me and I'm mostly really polite and inclusive and all. But I didn't find many people I considered interesting at these places.
I got all my friends from meetups, online communities, parties, etc.
Every time I noticed such things going on at a company, I jumped ship.
Stuff we've got:
- weekly all hands meetings where people talk about what makes them excited - lots of non-work-related chat rooms - 2-3 meetup opportunities per year - culture of quick ad-hoc synchronous meetings
We also had a board game night via Tabletop Simulator (http://berserk-games.com/tabletop-simulator/)
It also helps massively if the company is remote-first. We've got a central office where several employees are based but you never feel like you're missing out if you're based elsewhere.
On a side note, I'm also tangentially interested to see how VR can affect the remote workspace. I've used Bigscreen Beta (shared multiplayer lounge with virtual screens) with the Vive to work on a mutual side project with some friends and being able to see each other's screens by turning your head rather than by sharing with some program has also made the experience feel closer to in person work.