How To Build Trust With Your Remote Team in 2025

Remote and hybrid teams can be just as effective as those that work in the same physical location. Leading these teams to success, though, may require a different approach than when working together in-house.

Your teammates who work together in the office can build trust and camaraderie through organic, in-person “water cooler” interactions. But these types of spontaneous, face-to-face interactions don't happen in a remote work environment. Instead, you’ll have to make an intentional effort to foster trust and communication throughout your team.

Whether you’re leading a team of remote workers or wondering how to build better relationships with freelancers, this guide offers some of the tried and true strategies that have helped our own remote colleagues feel like integral parts of the team.

What’s the role of trust in remote work?

For your remote (and freelance) team members, building a foundation of trust is an important part of helping them feel like part of a collective. As a team leader, this may mean that you trust your remote team members to meet deadlines and execute tasks, even though you can’t physically see them working. And for your team, this may mean getting used to working with (and trusting) freelancers.

Remote workers and freelancers need to feel like they’re trusted to use their expertise to deliver quality work. Without this trust, some team members may feel overworked, left out of the loop, or micromanaged in a way that lowers morale.

By incorporating each of the 12 tips below into your managerial toolbox, you can create a strong and trusting team—whether you’re scattered across one city or working with freelancers around the world.

12 tips to help build trust with remote and freelance teams

By actively cultivating sincere feelings of trust between leaders, company employees, and freelancers, you can improve productivity and efficiency.

When your team members trust each other, including any freelancers in the mix, complex projects and busy periods can feel less daunting. Everyone knows who to turn to for help, whether that’s two colleagues brainstorming together or the whole team relying on a skilled freelancer to guide them through a software migration.

1. Be transparent, responsive, and dependable

As the leader of a remote team, you’ll need to exemplify the values you’d like your workers to share. Being open and honest is one of the most important things you can do to build trust. Your demonstration of these traits will encourage team members to do the same.

These positive behaviors create a firm foundation for working relationships. Let your team members and freelance contributors know that while there may be times you disagree, you value their input and ideas. This is especially relevant for freelancers, who you’ve likely brought on to the team due to their specific skills and knowledge!

Additionally, be responsive and dependable. Working remotely, or as the only freelancer on a team, can sometimes feel isolating. Let your collaborators know when you’re available to help them with project-related questions or concerns.

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2. Schedule regular check-ins

Creating a standing team meeting is also helpful for building trust and transparency.

Find the meeting cadence that works best for your team. Some teams with rapidly changing project needs find that they work best with quick daily meetings of no more than 15 minutes, though these can be hard to schedule when colleagues are distributed across time zones. Teams working on a longer project cycle may find that weekly or monthly meetings suit their needs.

It’s a good idea to record virtual meetings if some members of your team work asynchronously. All enterprise-grade video conferencing software, such as Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, have this capability.

You can choose to add freelancers to your team meetings or set up a system for asynchronous updates. If you’re working in overlapping time zones (and the freelancer is on board), then bringing them into your meetings can help to encourage trust and good working relationships with the others on your team. 

But don’t let time zones keep you from working with great talent on the other side of the world. Meeting recordings, Loom videos, voice notes, and Slack messages can all help you feel closely connected to freelancers ... even if their workday happens while you’re asleep.

3. Set expectations

Setting clear expectations for your team is another important part of building trust.

When you meet with a new freelancer, make sure you’re both on the same page regarding project schedules, deliverables, communication methods, and billing processes. And if it’s your very first time working with freelance pros, know that they can often help to guide you through the kickoff process and start a successful collaboration.

And when a new employee joins your team, let them know what you expect in terms of work hours, skills, professional development, communication, and more.

By discussing all parties’ expectations up front, you get an opportunity to make sure that both your needs and those of the freelancer or employee are met. You’re showing that you care about their happiness and comfort on your team, and are also clear about what you need from them.

Remember, though, that balance is important. For example, you can express to a freelancer that you want to have weekly check-in meetings—but they’re ultimately responsible for setting their own working hours.

If you’re too exacting in your expectations, team members might feel micromanaged. That’s detrimental to building trust.

You should also recognize when your team members need help adjusting to changes like bringing a freelancer onto a project for the first time. For many people, these kinds of changes are uncomfortable; they’re emotionally attached to the old methods, feel that change is an indictment of their performance, and worry about their job security.

Implementing change management principles can be helpful whenever your team goes through an adjustment period. This can include creating communication plans that explain exactly what’s happening, developing new training materials, holding open forums with your team members so they can ask questions, addressing any concerns, and more.

(You can hire freelance change management professionals to help you with this as well.)

4. Establish clear goals and objectives

You’ll need to set expectations and goals for specific projects, too. Goal setting—and progress tracking—sets your team up for success. Everyone will understand the role they and their colleagues (including freelancers) play, which is vital for building trust.

There are a variety of ways to set goals for your team, and a freelance project manager or change management professional can help you figure out the best options.

The SMART goal system is often a good place to start, too. A SMART goal is:

• Specific. What should your team accomplish? Who is responsible?
• Measurable. How will you track progress toward the goal?
• Achievable. Can your team actually accomplish this goal with their available resources? Should you hire additional freelancers to help?
• Relevant. How does this goal relate to your work? Why are you working toward it?
• Time-bound. What’s the time frame in which the goal is to be accomplished?

Remember to work with your employees and freelance collaborators when setting goals. By getting everyone’s input on the process, you can continue to build strong and trusting relationships.

Plus, if you talk to your freelance team members about immediate and long-term goals, they may be able to use their experience to offer valuable insights.

5. Identify team roles and foster accountability

Once you’ve identified and communicated your team’s goals, you’ll want to be clear about everyone’s individual responsibilities.

As you do this, though, remember that freelancers often have clearly defined skill sets and scopes of work. A freelancer on your team may not be interested in taking on a different type of project—or they may not have the time in their schedule! Before assigning a role to your trusted freelancers, check in and make sure they’re available and open to it. If not, they may have referrals for additional freelancers that would be a great fit to collaborate on the project, too.

The DACI and RACI frameworks can be helpful for outlining and communicating everyone’s role on a project. Under these frameworks, each person involved in the project is assigned a specific role as illustrated in the table below:

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The DACI and RACI frameworks can provide clarity to internal teams about how freelancers are helping with a project. At the same time, they can also guide freelancers toward reaching out to the right people at your company as work moves forward. 

6. Encourage consistency

You can further build the bonds of trust among internal team members and freelancers by encouraging consistency. Do this by:

• Tracking time worked and workload distribution
• Working with internal team members to set personal goals and track progress
• Ensuring that all internal team members have the tools to perform their responsibilities
• Making sure that freelance collaborators have the information they need from your company in order to do their work
• Recognizing a job well done

By establishing a consistent workflow and process, you can help all team members and contributors further settle into their roles and responsibilities.

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7. Introduce team collaboration tools

Collaboration tools are essential for consistent, successful remote work. These platforms make it easy to have ongoing touch points between team members. They can also help to reduce the number of meetings required to keep progress moving forward.

While the specific suite of collaboration tools that each team needs will vary, you might consider starting with:

• Chat apps like Slack or Discord
• Video conferencing tools like Skype or Zoom
• File sharing and cloud services like Google Drive
• Project management applications like Hive or Monday.com

These tools typically allow you to invite guest users or share access links with third parties, so freelancers can collaborate with your internal team in key spaces. By using these tools to align your team’s workflows and communication, you can continue to strengthen trust and improve remote collaboration.

8. Help team members create connections

You can also leverage these collaboration tools to help boost camaraderie between team members and freelancers. As colleagues get to know each other better, their trust in each other’s abilities will grow. Try some of the following to break the ice:

• Schedule an optional monthly coffee hour or happy hour for social conversations via video call. (The Upwork content team does this, and it’s always a fun time!)
• Assign each new internal team member a “buddy” to show them the ropes and answer questions.
• Use apps like Donut, which works with Slack, to pair up team members for one-on-one chats.

Without leaders making an active effort to create connections between remote team members, everyone can easily remain in their own little bubble. Building trust is hard if you don’t have the foundation of a personal connection.

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9. Focus on team output and celebrate successes

You may also be able to help your team build trust by highlighting how well they work together. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), project progress, and results, you can celebrate with your team when there are:

• Increases in work output due to direct collaboration
• Improved returns on project investment
• Notable milestones achieved through teamwork
• Instances of positive recognition or feedback from other departments, executives, or clients

Tracking progress and wins can also be helpful for illustrating the value that freelancers bring to your company.

While those metrics are great to have when you want to make the case for hiring more freelancers, they can also help to solidify the trust between team members. As internal employees begin to see how working alongside freelancers helps them succeed, their trust and reliance on each other can grow.

10. Avoid micromanaging your team

Try to avoid micromanaging your team. Staying out of day-to-day activities can be difficult to master at first, especially if you’re used to working within an arm’s reach of your team at the office. When working remotely, though, micromanaging behaviors may give the impression that you don’t trust your team’s skills or work ethic.

If you find yourself doing any of the following, you may be unintentionally micromanaging your team:

• You hesitate to assign important tasks to members of your team
• You prefer that your team copies you on every email they send
• It feels like your schedule is clogged with one-on-one meetings
• You wonder if your team is working all day, even though their productivity and output is strong
• You receive comments from colleagues about how your team seems very dependent on you
• It’s hard to focus on the big picture with your team
• You feel burned out and stressed, even though you have people you could or should rely on for help

Over time, micromanagement can create friction between team members and leadership, which makes it hard to strengthen bonds of trust.

You’ll also want to remember that freelancers are used to working independently and often do so because they enjoy the flexibility of setting their own schedules. A key part of building trust with freelance talent is relying on them to get the job done when and as promised!

11. Respect (and leverage) time zone differences

When your team is remote, there’s a good chance you work in multiple time zones. This is especially true when working with freelancers.

When you’re working with freelancers who live in different places, you’ll need to respect that they may have working hours that don’t overlap with yours. By not demanding that they attend meetings that are in the middle of the night for them, for example, you show that you trust them to be reliable and responsible—albeit asynchronously.

This can certainly take some getting used to, and you may have to work a little harder at building trust with folks who you have infrequent real-time conversations with.

But there are many benefits to working with freelancers in different time zones, too. You can actually use this to your advantage! Just think about it—if you have a trusted freelancer living on the other side of the world from you, they’ll be working on projects while you’re off the clock. If the timing works out, you can actually keep work moving forward a full 24 hours per day.

12. Support a healthy work-life balance

Finally, one of the best ways to build trust with your team is to show that you support their maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Your actions might include:

• Supporting your team when they need to adjust their hours because of an appointment or change in their personal lives.
• Encouraging your internal team to use their time off throughout the year.
• Not requiring after-hours phone calls or email communication (except in special, occasional circumstances).
• Working with your company to provide resources for internal team members’ health and well-being.
• Developing a backup system so that when one person is out of office, the team knows whom to call on for specific needs.
• Requesting that team members working after hours schedule emails and messages in group communication tools for delivery during the company’s standard work hours.
• Being mindful of project scope creep, which is when you add additional, unexpected elements to a freelancer’s assignments or contract.

If your team finds it hard to maintain their work-life balance or feels they don’t have the trust and support to do so, you could see higher levels of burnout and turnover. And if freelance talent finds it difficult to work with your team, they may pass this knowledge on to other professional colleagues in their network (or leave honest client feedback on your company’s Upwork profile).

Next steps

Starting each of these 12 tips can feel tricky or cumbersome at first, but with practice, it’ll begin to feel comfortable. Over time, expanding your remote workforce with more talent will become easy.

When you reach that point, and you’re ready to hire new talent for your remote team, turn to Upwork for direct access to thousands of professionals with the exact skills you need. Whether you’re looking for software developers, administrative support, or marketing pros, keep building a team you trust by posting a job on Upwork today.

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