An interesting idea I saw many years ago was Nat Friedman's "Everybody Dials In": if there are *any* team members on the other end of a telecom or video link, instead of the people "in the building" gathering in a room and dialing in as a group, everybody dials in individually (usually from their desks). The advantage is twofold: 1) nobody has to be "the remote people", 2) any issues with video or phone meetings are surfaced and dealt with much more quickly, and the team culture evolves so that distributed-team meetings become smoother.

Link to the original post: http://gnome.soup.io/post/54171321/Nat-Friedman-Everyone-dials-in