When remote work feels wonky, remember: Autonomy, Accountability, and Awareness.

Remote work needs a trusting and open culture to flourish - we’ve identified 3 pillars of remote work based on the Driveway.app team’s experience working across Beijing, Prague, and NYC time zones.

Here’s what these three pillars mean to us, how we’re incorporating them, and questions you can ask your team about how they’re doing.

Autonomy:

• Empowering individuals to do their jobs without disturbing each other.
• Ways to increase autonomy: Document decisions and processes publicly in easy to find places. Buy the tools / equipment / software your team needs to achieve their goals.
• Questions to ask your team: Do you feel you have the tools you need to do your job? How do you feel about your current roles and responsibilities? When do you do your best work?

Accountability:

• Having the responsible party agree on what success looks like, how we’ll evaluate it, and what we’ll do if things aren’t going well.
• Ways to increase accountability: Set clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and job descriptions. Align on a meeting schedule and agenda that monitors responsibilities.
• Questions to ask your team: Do you feel you can get done everything on your plate? What do you think I should look out for if things aren’t going well?

Awareness:

• Being perceptive, specifically around what’s working well and what isn’t.
• Ways to increase awareness: Run a regular retrospective on what’s working well and what isn’t at all levels of the company. Make feedback a part of every 1:1.
• Questions to ask your team: How are you feeling? What can I do better?

When these three pillars work together, your team can safely know what to do, how to work, and how they’ll improve. Missing one of these three pillars leaves teams either unmotivated, unproductive, or unhappy.

If I could offer one piece of advice - it’s to have genuine and thoughtful conversations with your team. Be sure to dig on the questions that might scare you too. Remote work is hard - we can only do it better together.

If you’re passionate about helping remote teams work better reach out to us on Twitter - we’re hiring engineers and looking for startups with less than 10 employees as alpha testers.