In an office, trust accumulates passively. You see someone stay late to fix a bug. You overhear them helping a colleague. You share a bad coffee and complain about the deploy pipeline together.

Remote removes all of that. Trust has to be built intentionally or it doesn't build at all.

The most effective thing I've done is make 1:1s genuinely personal. Not status updates — those belong in writing. The 1:1 is for the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else: how someone is actually doing, what's frustrating them, what they're excited about. It takes a few sessions to get there, but once it does, everything else gets easier.

The second thing is defaulting to visibility. When I make a decision, I write down why. When I change my mind, I say so. When something goes wrong, I say that too. It sounds basic, but a lot of managers underestimate how much uncertainty remote engineers carry when context is missing.