4 Simple and Sustainable Routines to Build Trust on Your Remote Team

One of the toughest challenges remote and hybrid managers face is maintaining trust and collaboration when you can’t rely on natural, informal connections. When those water-cooler moments disappear, teams often feel disconnected, leading to lower morale and lower productivity. 

Sometimes, remote team managers overcorrect by forcing connection through a prescriptive team event like a virtual happy hour. Unfortunately, this strategy can backfire when it feels forced and the conversation quickly becomes stale. Instead, you need an intentional and holistic strategy built on inclusivity, consistency, and transparency. While you should absolutely strive to create a full cultural framework, these four simple strategies are sustainable ideas that provide vital moments of trust and appropriate vulnerability in a low-touch way.

1. The Informal Async "Weekend Win" Check-In

Your team is comprised of people first, workers second. Starting the week by giving the team a simple, optional opportunity to share a bit about their non-work life reinforces this and builds a strong foundation of trust.

• The Routine: Every Monday morning, use a dedicated, low-priority chat channel (like a specific Slack or Teams thread) for a brief, asynchronous, and informal check-in.

• Authentic Implementation Tips: 

• Start the Thread: The manager or a leader must start the thread first and set the tone by sharing a genuinely low-stakes, non-work detail.

• Take Genuine Interest: As team members respond, engage with genuine interest. It can be tempting to “like” or “heart” every post. That’s a nice thing to do, but it ends the connection immediately. Instead, think about what you would say if you were making small talk face-to-face and reply in the thread.

• Make It Optional: Never call out team members who don't participate. The success of this ritual is measured by the quality of engagement, not the quantity of participants.

• Be Flexible: However, it is important to be realistic about this. Not every ritual works for every team. If it seems like it is becoming a chore for your team, try something else. Forcing a routine that does not work on the team will have the opposite intended effect.

2. Make Individual and Team Recognition Public and Predictable

In virtual environments, appreciation often gets buried in private direct messages or individual calls. Public recognition is a powerful tool to reinforce positive behavior and build collective trust, ensuring teammates are aware of valuable contributions outside of their immediate purview.

• The Routine: Make feedback a regular and routine part of your ways of working by incorporating positive feedback into your regular updates, dedicating space to recognition, and encouraging your team to recognize valued efforts.

• Authentic Implementation Tips:

  • Build Recognition into Your Regular Updates: When providing team-level updates, be sure to call out specific contributors who went above and beyond. Get into the habit of including positive feedback about teammates in every team update where appropriate.

  • Designate A Channel for Praise: Use one channel where team members can offer praise and thanks to other team members. While this should not be the only place you and your team members provide recognition, having a dedicated space to provide visible recognition can help build morale and trust among team members and serve as a running, historical document of positive team efforts.

  • Amplify Kudos: Comment on or share team kudos from other team members in a more public channel (though use your discretion based on how sensitive the topic may be and your individual teammate’s personality, as some people do not like public recognition.).

3. Establish Context with Feedback and Commenting Norms

When providing constructive criticism or reviewing a work product asynchronously, it's easy for team members to focus only on the red ink, which can lead to demoralization and a fear of sharing work early. Without including the “why” behind a slew of edits, your team can think you do not trust or value their work. Trust requires transparent and contextualized feedback.

• The Routine: Always provide context and positive reinforcement when using tracked changes or commenting on shared documents.

• Authentic Implementation Tips:

• Feedback Framing Summary: Leave a general summary at the top of the document or section that frames overall thoughts about the product before providing detailed edits (e.g., “This is a strong start and I like how thorough your market analysis was. There’s room to be more detailed in the stakeholder summary section and I’ve included some specific questions below.”).

• Use Video for Tone: For sensitive or complex revisions, record a 60-second, quick video explaining the revisions instead of relying on text. Hearing your voice removes ambiguity and prevents the feedback from sounding harsh or punitive.

• Provide Rationale for the Context Behind the Edit: For more complex changes, use the commenting feature to explain the strategic reason behind the change. This builds the teammate's competency and shows you trust them enough to share your reasoning.

4. Define and Utilize Chat Platform Statuses

There’s nothing more exasperating than sending a critical message and expecting a reply, only to not hear back for hours. This lack of predictability can create anxiety and an environment ripe for micromanagement. The key is to make the rules of engagement clear and predictable.

• The Routine: Formalize and consistently use your chat platform's status update features to manage expectations and respect focus time.

• Authentic Implementation Tips:

• Define Availability: Encourage your team to use the system status to share if they’re available for chat, checking messages intermittently, or not available until a designated time. Consider setting a default team expectation is (e.g., intermittently available), then have your staff update their status if they deviate from the default.

• Model the Behavior: Managers should model this behavior - especially when blocking off time to do deep work. This gives the team explicit permission to also protect their own focus time.

• Explicitly Mention Urgency: Encourage teammates to preface non-urgent chat questions with an easily-skimmable tag up front, like [Not Urgent]. This immediately removes the pressure for an instant reply. 

These are just a few of many low-maintenance but high impact ways to reinforce trust on your remote team. To explore more strategies for building a strong People and Participation culture and setting transparent expectations, contact us to schedule a workshop today.