Building Trust in Virtual Learning Environments
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Cultivating a culture of trust in a remote learning environment

This strategy explores how leaders can set up the conditions to help facilitate a culture of trust among educators and students in virtual and remote learning.

Trust is a key ingredient for promoting workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion across all aspects of a system or organization’s life. Trust helps build healthy and dynamic relationships among colleagues and creates conditions to help staff collaborate effectively in teams. Strong levels of trust create an environment that encourages teams to be authentic and vulnerable.

Effective communication makes trust possible and is critical for system-wide effectiveness. Leaders should aim to develop psychologically safe environments and promoting cultures that support diversity, as well as equitable and inclusive programs, policies, and practices.

When staff work in the same physical space, communication is often taken for granted, and intent and meaning can be conveyed implicitly through nonverbal cues. In remote environments, where staff members work from a home office, many conventional and familiar ways of communicating are simply not possible. Non-verbal cues are often not easily detected, thus more opportunities exist for misunderstandings and disconnection.

The success of DEI work depends largely upon our ability to communicate across distances, between differences in roles and identity, and into our unique world views, life filters, and professional perspectives. Effective communication creates the conditions where trust can take root and blossom into new forms of authentic relationships, powerful and sustained collaboration, and a deeper embrace of diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces.

Trust is generally built in the workplace across three key dimensions:

  1. Integrity: Trust that team members will perform reliably and predictably, per group norms.

  2. Ability: Trust that team members are fully competent to perform their tasks.

  3. Kindness: Trust that team members genuinely care about each other’s well-being.

Remote Communications Strategies

In January 2020, the Remote DEI Collective conducted a survey of employees across the Collective’s seven participating remote and semi-remote organizations. The purpose of the survey was to capture information to better understand and support diversity, equity, and inclusion in remote environments. Respondents were specifically asked to share and describe strategies their organizations had used to encourage trust-building among team members to help them share their feelings, be candid, or be vulnerable. These strategies are shared below and are organized by the two types of trust identified by this overarching literature review – cognitive (integrity/ability) or affective (benevolence), and then sorted by key strategy areas.

Strategies for Building Trust Through Integrity and Ability

STRATEGY 1: Foster a learning environment

  • Put together an intentional learning arc for each team member

  • Learning assignments, fostering accountability

  • Establish ‘everything is a prototype’ attitude

  • Anonymous surveys

  • Quarterly team pulse-checks

  • Encourage individuals to resolve issues

  • Create big-picture context with weekly articles/emails from leadership

STRATEGY 2: Create a feedback/support culture

  • Intentional scheduling of information and feedback sessions

  • Buddy systems

  • Connecting time within each meeting or check-in

  • Weekly one-on-one meetings

  • Processes to encourage open feedback

Strategies for Building Trust Through Kindness

STRATEGY 1: Make time for time together

  • Retreats for team-building and relationship-building

  • In-person and virtual off-sites, often with expert facilitation

  • One-on-one virtual coffees

  • Biweekly personal/professional sharing/updates in team meetings

  • “Pop-up” meetings

  • Weekly team meetings

  • Team “hangouts”

  • Integrative Community of Practice (CoP) time

STRATEGY 2: Create resources to bring out your team’s “whole selves”

  • Racial autobiographies

  • User manuals; profiles for each team member about their preferences, likes, dislikes, communication styles, personality/disposition assessments, and more

STRATEGY 3: Get to know your team on many levels

  • Listening tours

  • Structured, personal sharing

  • Team meeting sharing time

  • Ice-breakers

STRATEGY 4: Create space for dialogue around DEI topics

  • Cross-racial and racial affinity groups

  • Book clubs

  • Culture surveys

  • ‘Equity pauses’ to reflect on how white supremacy (or other inequities) may have been present in meetings

  • Debriefs and problems of practice

STRATEGY 5: Celebrate/express gratitude

  • Intentional space (group, one-on-one) to share triumphs and struggles within and outside of work

  • Intentional space for gratitude

  • Marking birthday and life events among colleagues


The Remote DEI Collective was a collaborative group led by The Learning Accelerator (TLA), and brought together participants from remote organizations to address the challenges of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in remote environments. This strategy has been adapted from the Remote DEI Collective’s toolkit, which was built to offer resources to improve remote culture and practices, in order to better suit leaders and educators working for schools that offer virtual and hybrid learning options to students.

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