Trust - and How to Build Trust in a Virtual Team
Copyright by Stephan Klaschka 2010-2025
We can all agree that a key element for fruitful collaboration is trust in each other. A high level of trust among the members of an organization leads to better results through collaboration than in a distrustful organization.
This ‘soft factor’ trust is subtle, hard to build, but easy to lose. Building and keeping it requires consistent behaviors, especially from the manager of a remote or virtual team. So let’s look into what trust is and how to build it in an organization:
Do you trust?
Take a minute to ask yourself two questions honestly and come up with an answer for each question before reading on:
Do you trust yourself to be as productive working from home as in the office?
Now this:
Do you trust your coworkers or your direct reports to work as productively from home, too?
My own experiences are consistent with the research: we trust ourselves more than others. - And this is the problem.
Why trust matters
A person we don't trust, we don’t want to work or do business with. On the flipside, a trustworthy personal connection is unsurpassed as a basis to build upon trust for a robust and sustainable business relationship and collaboration.
Trust contributes much to the 'social glue’ that holds teams and organizations together. Trust is critical for the success of remote or virtual teams. With a lack of trust, the willingness to share information dwindles, and so does productivity overall. When this happens, our energy gets wasted every day with concerns and redundant or counterproductive work. Workers focus on avoiding perceived threats from others, which takes over more and more of their work time, focus, and productivity. In contrast, for people we trust, we happily go the 'extra mile.'
Trust (or the absence thereof) has been identified as the pivotal element, ranging from detailed investigations and research into hundreds of organizations to recent bestsellers like "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni.
Coming back to the two earlier questions, it proves hard turning the mirror towards ourselves and to accept that we also need to build trust with our co-workers to build and fuel our most robust and valuable business connections and relationships.
What is trust?
Let’s take a closer look – what makes up trustworthy work relationships? Trust is an interpersonal phenomenon. It comes down to three factors that make up trust at the workplace:
Benevolence: Your co-workers have your best interests at heart.
Ability: Your co-workers have the knowledge and ability to get the job done.
Integrity: Your co-workers will do what they promise.
Innovation needs trust
High trust correlates with more successful innovation – why?
When colleagues trust each other, they open up and share information. Besides the obvious benefit of cross-fertilization that leads to more ideas and creative approaches, by giving away our views and knowledge, we become vulnerable as individuals and even more so in a competitive professional environment. This openness comes with a risk of failure that people are only willing to take if failure is acceptable and does not come with repercussions.
Sharing ideas alone is not enough, though. Asking thoughtful questions, constructive criticism, and mutual support lead to better solutions while curbing hostility and competitiveness. Opening up happens when a task-related conflict does not easily deteriorate into a personal conflict. Innovation within an organization relies on trust among colleagues as a key ingredient that cannot be substituted otherwise.
How to build trust
Trust requires communication and is built most effectively face-to-face with another person, which offers the broadest information channels. An MIT study found a 47% higher performance in companies that are highly effective communicators. Team success is consistently tied to robust team communications. (I wonder if this communication-related increase in performance was ever considered by companies focusing on saving cost...?)
Customer-facing businesses know that no technology today can offer the same quality and trust-building dialogue as in-person and face-to-face.
Thus, travel to meet business partners and team members remains essential at least in the beginning of a relationship. Traveling more to meet in person is out of the question for organizations that boarded the popular 'cost-cutting' train: it is considered too expensive. Saving cost here, though, does not pay off over time when it cuts into building trust for good working relationships.
Even more important is trust-building when onboarding new staff. It is a challenge if most or all work is done remotely by team members who already know and trust each other. It comes back to human nature that we tend to rely on the same people we worked with before, which puts newcomers at a natural disadvantage. Here, management must intervene to level the playing field and provide opportunities also for the new staff.
Perhaps, women are at a natural advantage to connect with others, given a higher social sensitivity, i.e., the ability to 'read' other people's emotions face to face better than men. This is also one of the three criteria that increases group intelligence (see "Boost ‘Group Intelligence’ for better decisions!")
Investing in trust and technology
Since it is not possible (and defeats the purpose of having a remote team) to meet in person, especially in remote teams, we use digital technology to bridge the distance. Consequently, we need to invest in effective tools to remove communication barriers and open broad, information-rich channels of communication among all team members.
Rather than relying on one channel or system, it is more effective to enable the team to communicate by offering many channels that cater to the individual team member's preferences; for example, phone, instant messaging, video chat, email, etc. For example, even half a minute waiting to establish a video-conference connection is too long and already poses a significant communication barrier, as an initial positive mindset of participants erodes quickly, and their thoughts start wandering off. (Costly 'tele-presence' systems seem to remain the ‘gold standard’ for remote communication from fixed locations, but even then, it remains -sadly- often reserved only for executive use if this technology is being invested in at all.
Nonetheless, enabling technology can also enhance performance and add value by
Indicating if people are online and available to communicate
Finding experts or collaborators easily within large organizations
Share and exchange information with relevant audiences directly and without delay.
In contrast, here are some examples of communication barriers of organizations with a cost-saving focus that tends to include also 'technological disablement', such as
Using slow or time-delaying communication or productivity equipment due to underinvestment
Users are spending more time trying to connect than actually communicating
Information-poor channels or poor call quality inhibit rich communication
Resolving technology-related problems consumes a long time or is a cumbersome process.
Too much trust can hurt innovation
As a side note for completeness, there is a risk that too much trust within a team can become an obstacle to innovation, too; see "Why too much trust hurts innovation".
It comes down to management again to be observant and vigilant to detect and counteract such tendencies.
While introducing remote work in virtual teams comes with significant change and challenges for everyone involved, the burden and the responsibility to make it work remain with the manager.
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