How does your distributed team stay in sync?

Hey gang,

I feel like we've tried everything! It's amazing how much harder it is to get a group to align on a decision when everyone isn't co-located.

I'm sure it depends on the team and the decision, but what's worked best for you all?

Here's an example of the steps our team went through to pick a mission statement:

#1 - Our team is in NYC, Prague, and Beijing so we try to avoid meetings. We did an async written brainstorm, a forum-style conversation.
#2 - We mentioned it in planning over Zoom and got some more feedback
#3 - We followed up on that feedback over Slack, someone suggested a meeting
#4 - We hopped into branch.gg to pick final options
#5 - We then sent out a poll where people could rank the final options
#6 - The mission statement with the most votes ended up being the one we aligned on in step #1 🤣

So obviously a lot could've gone differently. One of us could just make the decision - but I'm talking about trying to find consensus, not just a majority vote, or a most powerful voice in the room.

I do wonder if feedback over Zoom made us overly nervous that we missed something in step #1, when we actually had enough information to make the decision. In an office setting, you kind of assume people will mention it to you if they have a real problem with something, whereas in remote it's easier to have doubts on alignment.

Curious everyone's take! What processes or tools work best for you? Included a poll focused on tooling, even though these are mutually exclusive, but I figured it could be interesting to see what other people pick.