Using a healthy dose of remote talent in the mix was always a great idea that made both financial and organizational sense for companies. However, remote workers, till just a few months ago, were at best ad hoc gap fillers for most of the companies. But as things go, it always takes a crisis to bring about major changes that were there crying for our attention. Covid-19 has fundamentally shifted the traditional paradigm and has made remote work the new normal.
While the change is here to stay, it’s not going to be an easy transition for most of the organizational leaders who have risen the ladders of hierarchy practicing the conventional organizational hypothesis that was built around driving productivity inside the four walls.
The biggest issue facing the organizations today in the distributed workforce context is the issue of TRUST! Building and maintaining trust in the traditional, physical workplace is difficult enough, how are you going to trust your team members who are not within your sight? How are the employees going to in turn trust that you have their back? How do we build the two way trusts remotely?
Trust is an essential building block of any successful team. According to the “Great Place To Work” a data science company, “Regardless of industry, company size, or leadership styles, a high-trust culture is a defining characteristic of every company that wins a spot on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, a list that we have produced each year since 1998,”
It’s, therefore imperative for the leadership of an organization to actively encourage bonding and transparency among team members. It’s all the more important in case of the distributed teams where people often have to work with people they haven’t met in person. When it comes to virtual teams, trust needs to be actively accelerated and maintained lest it could lead to assumptions and misinterpretations that break down trust.
Enough studies and empirical evidence are now valuable on this subject which point to the fact that it’s feasible to build trust remotely. It requires proactive measures that need to be built into company’s culture and its policies.
Trust over tracking:
A good starting point is to choose trust over doubt about the employee behavior on the job. Skepticism about employee behavior leads to organizations using tracking tools such as Teramind, Time Doctor, VeriClock etc. These tools rely on invasive techniques such as GPS tracking, automatic screenshots of employees’ computers, and even photos taken with the computer camera. Such invasion of privacy is likely to build an environment of mutual mistrust which is rarely helpful in meeting organizational and team goals. An environment of mistrust often results into managers ending up micromanaging and employees ending up overworking to prove themselves. Both of those situations produce sub-optimal results and need to be discarded in the favour of building trust.
Instead of micromanaging or intensively tracking employees, managers can monitor for changes in both behavior and work output of the remote employees to more effectively identify, diagnose, and choose corrective actions. Such an approach, as opposed to employee tracking, helps build trust and improves productivity.
Earlier the Better
It’s a lot easier to build trust at the team formation stage when people are usually willing to give others the benefit of the doubt (HBR). At the formation stage there is a greater realization among team members that tram’s success is a collective responsibility and they must come together as a complementary unit. HBR calls it the “honeymoon period” of a relationship when people are more inclined to trust each other.
The leadership can use this period to build trust by clearly articulating team’s objectives and by highlighting what each team member brings to the table. A clearly defined team goal can help bring people as also the understanding about how their contributions complement each other and play a part in the team’s outcomes.
Transparency in communication
According to a study by the HBR team, the researchers found that teams lacking in trust tended to have unpredictable communication patterns. Therefore maintaining channels for continued, transparent communication is the most effective way is an essential prerequisite to build trust among the team members. The study further found that the in high-trust teams, communications were regular and predictable.
In today’s world its lot easier with the availability of multiple team collaboration tools for calendaring, scheduling, sharing etc. Companies can use the right mix of synchronous communication—such as phone calls or video conferences—and asynchronous communication—including Slack, Trello, Jira etc and Microsoft Teams etc —to collaborate and communicate effectively.
While tools are a great assist, the managers must make sure that there is a culture of regular contacts and updates. Regular check-ins & communications, shared status updates and reports drive motivation and accountability and shows everyone is equally invested in the team’s success.
Encourage informal communication
Informal communication among the team members is equally critical in building a sense of mutual belonging and trust. In a traditional office set up, getting to know one’s co-workers is automatically built into the environment. But for distributed teams, this needs to be proactively encouraged and nurtured. Team members tend to discover each other better and veer towards people who have shared values as them. Relationships that extend beyond work build empathy, and empathy builds trust and accountability.
Managers can achieve this by encouraging personal connection into team interactions. They can make liberal use of private groups in social-networking apps or even create intranet private chat groups for for sharing just-for-fun content. There are empirical finding that support the hypothesis that such activities unite the teams and make the members more invested in each other’s success for the effort.
Focus on productivity
Companies that use tracking tools to monitor their employees can only track the number of hours being put by them, that is, whether people are working from 9-5 or 8-7 or anything like that. However number of hours spent on the job does not linearly get transferred to productivity. In a distributed team set up it’s important for the manager to focus on output and not on time-in-seat. The manager must show trust and ability to empower every person to manage their time, to manage their days and their responsibilities around an output.
Ultimately, employees should be held accountable for the work they deliver, not the hours they work.
Decentralise Power
A distributed team’s efficiency and trust cannot be driven by the traditional “command and control” mindset. According to a study of virtual teams in a Fortune 500 global IT company, teams that had a high degree of trust, power had been shifted among the members depending on the stage of the project. A subject matter expert from amongst the team is more likely to take the team together by rallying them around the common team goal. Traditional leaders who understand this difference can drive efficiency and trust by adopting a mentoring approach towards the team members.
There is no denying the fact that building trust among the distributed teams is relatively far more difficult. At the same time, the hard truth is that teams can’t function without trust. What it requires is that the organisation’s leadership be much more pro-active in creating the right policies, processes, and habits that allow trust to flourish despite the physical distance that separates members of a distributed team.