Remote teams that operate well at small size often deteriorate as they grow. The variable is how much of what the organisation knows exists in a form that can be read later.
Conversation does not scale past the participants
A decision reached in a call is known to the people on it and to nobody else, and their recollections diverge within weeks.
In an office this is partially repaired by proximity, since the information leaks to people nearby through ordinary contact.
Remotely there is no leakage, so anything not written is confined to whoever attended, and the number of people excluded grows with the company.
Writing shifts effort from the reader to the author
Explaining something in a document takes longer than saying it, and the cost falls entirely on the person writing.
The benefit is distributed across everyone who reads it afterwards, including people who have not joined yet, and it accrues over time rather than immediately.
Because the cost is immediate and personal while the benefit is deferred and shared, individuals do not adopt the habit without the organisation deciding that they should.
Decisions are worth recording more than discussions are
Detailed notes of every conversation produce a volume nobody reads, which is a common way for documentation efforts to fail.
What has lasting value is what was decided, what alternatives were rejected and why, since that is what people need when the question resurfaces.
Without the reasoning, a recorded decision cannot be re-examined intelligently later, and teams end up relitigating settled questions with less information than the first time.
Findability matters as much as existence
A document that cannot be located when needed provides nothing, and large document collections become unusable without deliberate organisation.
Material that is written once and never revised is worse than absent, because a confident and outdated answer is acted on.
Organisations that treat their written record as something maintained rather than accumulated keep it useful, and those that do not eventually stop consulting it.
The habit has to be visible at the top
Where senior people make decisions in calls and announce conclusions without reasoning, the written culture is understood to be optional.
Where they write out their thinking and expect responses in the same form, the practice spreads because it is how influence is exercised.
This is the part that cannot be delegated to a tool or a policy, since the behaviour being copied is the one people can observe rather than the one they were told about.