It’s All About Trust
Three tips to develop trust in your virtual team.
Trust is the linchpin in our lives (personal & professional, but we’ll stick to professional here). But let’s face it — “trust” is hard for most people to quantitatively define, and even harder to consciously improve or develop. But there is a way.
If we are trusted and valued at work and trust and value others, then our teams stand a greater chance at success. If we are not trusted, if we are distrustful of others, productivity is derailed and the end-product, whatever it is, suffers.
Trust within a virtual team has the added hurdle of distance.
When we are physically close to others, trust — or mistrust — develops organically. We watch, we interact informally, we make eye contact, we laugh, we connect. If done well, the use of video can narrow that distance. This is relational trust, what most of us think of when we stop to think about trust at all.
When we are separated by distance, the primary way to develop trust comes from the work we produce. It comes from a harmony between the words we communicate and the actions that follow. Trust develops as the work unfolds and others deliver to us what we need, and we deliver the same to them. This is transactional trust — trusting someone to do something.
This transactional trust sounds pretty straight forward, but “receiving” and “sending” work products can get tricky, unless expectations have been clearly set.
Consider — you send a question to a teammate via email and you expect an answer that day. Your teammate thinks that if you needed an answer that day, you would have called, so your email gets left for the next day. Trust is breaking, not building.
Three Tips to Develop Trust in Your Virtual Team
Here are three proven ways to lay the groundwork for developing trust in virtual teams, and to nudge that needle toward a more trusting and productive team:
1. Establish Rules of Engagement
With your team, establish expectations and team norms on the how of communications -- how will your team prioritize communications — are email responses expected within 24 hours? 48? What technology will you use for urgent needs? Decide as a team. Do you prefer messaging or texting or phone calls? How will you make decisions? Who gets a vote, and who simply has a voice? Establishing expectations that everyone has a say in will develop trust.
2. Make Your Reward System Transparent (we’ll assume it’s already fair)
In virtual teams, the reward system takes on additional importance as remote team members often feel anonymous and isolated from their teammates. These feelings of anonymity and isolation lead to demotivation and mistrust. This will be especially critical as workers move back into office buildings part or full time.
One clear way to counteract these feelings is to establish a transparent and fair reward system that provides open acknowledgment for people’s time, effort, and ultimate contribution to the project. Simply having a fair reward system isn’t enough for a virtual team; it must be transparent to be a motivating and trust-building factor.
3. Share Leadership
Formal power and authority often diminish over distance. Our experience and research revealed that high-trust virtual teams allow the person with the most knowledge to lead the others. This person may change as the work goes through different development stages. Enabling various team members to engage in leadership behaviors promotes critical team cohesion. This shifting and sharing of power sends a powerful message of trust and allows each person to demonstrate and share their expertise. Of course, there still needs to be a formal leader, but one who isn’t grounded in traditional top down leadership.
Establishing a successful virtual team takes deliberate action. Giving everyone an assignment, sending them on their way, and hoping for the best isn’t setting things up for success. Teams cannot function without trust. Be deliberate and set the proper groundwork which will enable trust to develop.
It’s all about trust.
Stefanie Heiter
