You can fix it but it will take time and you will need to be very patient.
(1) let go of your frustration, it is not helping you, if you can't GOTO 3.
(2) pick the best of your colleagues and try to lift him/her up to your level with arguments, not with force (this will take time and oceans of patience)
(3) if that does not work, start looking for other employment, no matter how much you like your boss
(4) if it does work, then now you have a buddy, who already knows your method works, rinse and repeat at (2) until you've either had enough of it or you find that you now have a well oiled team.
Good luck! (You'll need it, this is not an easy thing to do). And if you manage to make this work you are management material yourself.
I think it's not clear if he is the project manager or not. If he has a project manager, then we have to ask why he isn't helping focus the team. Or are they are product a team that is expected to organize themselves.
I agree strongly with #1.
#2 I think it might be good to approach it by asking more questions. If people say it is hard, ask how can we achieve the goal of writing more tests without it being a burden? Maybe OP is perceived as pushy if he's not the manager, or he doesn't allow for enough input on how the process evolves if he is the manager.
Not I'm not project manager, I'm single remote dev. My manager try to the other devs write test, but they said to him that is impossible or too complex. So at that time I spend 2 days and I wrote the test and I wrote a long email with links, howtos, benefits, etc.. Nowadays they still say that it's too complex and no value added. My manager can't say test in all places: they complain about it and I tried the #2 but it didn't work.
#2 worked well with the vagrant box, at first days was too complex, now they loved.. but with test and pep8 code style is a long battle. I think that I'm trying to change how they use to work, and they don't want to change how they work.
I always use to explain that, as a friend, is good for all, but I can't get it.
#1 Yes, me too, but when you reviewed 18 PR in 2 days without good code indention, half of them didn't work and 70% was mark as resolved in the task-manager I need to run a marathon every morning to keep away my frustration. Maybe was that last week I was on holidays and these days I only fixed problems.
I didn't realize it was remote. I think that changes things, since it's difficult to nail the relationship-building part as a remote worker. I think communication is going to be the biggest challenge, particularly if different people don't speak English as their first language.
An email with links and explanations might just fly over the head of a lot of people. One approach I used when working remotely is making short videos, or walking people through things using something like TeamViewer.
(1) let go of your frustration, it is not helping you, if you can't GOTO 3.
(2) pick the best of your colleagues and try to lift him/her up to your level with arguments, not with force (this will take time and oceans of patience)
(3) if that does not work, start looking for other employment, no matter how much you like your boss
(4) if it does work, then now you have a buddy, who already knows your method works, rinse and repeat at (2) until you've either had enough of it or you find that you now have a well oiled team.
Good luck! (You'll need it, this is not an easy thing to do). And if you manage to make this work you are management material yourself.