This an area where companies will see problems with reopening offices - the people who aren't there (eg remote hires who work hundreds of miles away, people who choose not to return, people who still need to isolate, etc) will feel far less included, will see that their prospects at the company are worse, and ultimately are much more likely to leave because the social aspect of Slack will die off. Maintaining inclusion in a partially remote company is incredibly hard.
in my experience, you need to be all the way into one camp (remote) or the other (on-site) to reap the full benefits, otherwise you are just getting the downsides of both.
any best practices that others have found for dealing with a distributed, hybrid team? (assuming you don’t have the authority to make everyone onsite/remote)
it is, but some people who prefer the remote world do so because they don't need nor want to socialize with their coworkers.
[1] I "work" from the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida office. My manager is in Tampla, Florida, and my two other team members are in Reston, Virginia and Seattle, Washington [2]. There's a push from upper management to get people back in the office in May, but there's no way I'm going in. No point to it.
[2] Due to our company being bought out by a larger company, and the rest of my team basically retiring at the end of 2020.