8 Strategies For Building Trust In Virtual Teams Leave a comment

This means at the end of the week you either have something to show for your week or not. This means you trust that your teammates are getting something done. Games can be a low-cost way of bringing people together and helping them build relationships. The Miro team has a great set of ideas for games teams can play virtually. Buffer shifted from twice-a-year retreats to once a year as the company got larger.

Ultimately job performance is measured on productivity, but if you can’t trust that your team is doing their job each day without you watching over them closely, no one will be successful. Don’t waste time attempting to create and administer employee surveys on your own, though. Instead, rely on the expertise and science-backed tools that come with the best employee engagement platforms.

In most companies, the best team bonding experiences don’t happen in the office. They occur during the employee softball games, happy hours each Friday, or at the boss’s big holiday bash. However, who says you can’t host fun team building activities when you’re all working remotely? Communication and trust are the two most important things – and if you want them, you need to empower your team and give them the resources they need to succeed. In some cases, that means tools that simplify communication and task management, like Slack, Zoom, and Asana. Sometimes it means making sure they have consistent access to information – we maintain a company wiki full of how-to guides, important files, and more.

Regardless of location, all managers share the same basic challenges in leading people. Although it can be challenging, companies with remote teams need to embrace a new type of culture that promotes empowerment and trust to ensure their workforce can adapt and grow with their environments. Fortunately, business leaders can take a step in the right direction with these four tips for igniting trust in their remote workforce. Trust – We have a multitude of project management tools we use every day to ensure all projects are moving ahead and positively impacting the business’ overall goals. But we do have to trust that the team members are doing their job each day, and they have to trust that as the owners, we are there to support them. It’s that mutual trust that allows us to be respectful of each other’s workloads, ideas and ways of approaching everyday tasks.

Tip #4: Get To Know Your Team Better

So when everyone demonstrates their greatest skills and capabilities within the team, results will be incredible. Anita Keller is an Assistant Professor at the Organizational Psychology department, University of Groningen. She studies how work design interacts with leader and employee behavior and well-being over time. Her work https://globalcloudteam.com/ has been published in journals such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and Journal of Organizational Behavior. Sharon K. Parker is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, a Professor of Management at Curtin University, and Director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design.

Depending on the size of your team and the types of projects you work on, you can check in daily or weekly to learn about the status of a project and identify any roadblocks. Check-ins can be asynchronous so that you don’t interrupt work. Try automated Stand-ups to get your team accustomed to communicating more regularly.

Most companies using Slack or other chat apps have #random, #fun, #music, #books and a host of other interest-based channels where people can visit and chat about non-work things they share in common. You can encourage people to show their workspace either via photos or as a virtual tour on a video call. Yes, Vegas ticks the boxes for convenience, and general safety. But it’s not so great for people who don’t drink or want to be around all Vegas has to offer. And Bali might work for everyone, but many people won’t want to hang around their colleagues in bathing suits, so group activities and events should stick to acceptable norms for professional gatherings.

What Elements Are Key To Successful Working Relationships With Remote Teams?

Organize virtual team building events for the workers – a book club, a quiz about movies, sport-related video calls, or anything else that would be interesting to your colleagues. When you give people the discretion to decide for themselves how and when they will work, it is important to assess whether they are delivering the results. Hence, managers need to put more focus on the outputs of the work than the inputs.

I also have to say above and beyond anything else that kindness and helpfulness are huge – in fact we have made these qualities two of our top hiring criteria. A friend in human resources once told me that she measures the health of an organization by how helpful its people are. I’ve still not found a better measure for either office or remote environments. If you really focus on hiring kind and helpful people, I guarantee that communication won’t be a problem — even if your tools and processes aren’t perfect — and you’ll have a very healthy organization. Clear requirements and expectations starting from the job description, the interview and the trial terms.

• Trust is a powerful tool in retrospectives and, more importantly, in the workplace.
• Recognition is more than just a nice-to-have that leaders can get away with providing every now and then.
• Guard against just telling team members what the goal is without providing them with an idea of how that task is to be accomplished.
• Remote workers may choose different schedules for how they work from home—not to slack, but to fit when they’re most productive during the day.
• It’s also important to create structure within meetings themselves, to keep them efficient and to the point.

You could also have them do short activities or play a game during these calls. It is all about recreating that valuable watercooler time where coworkers can chat and something about each other, leading to trust-building in one another. Encourage everyone on the team to use webcams so the remote team can see each other faces during these virtual meetings and teleconferencing. Doing so will allow them to develop connections and trust among each other.

Fun Team

Only when we truly need input from multiple people to make a decision as a team do we call a meeting—which is another reason why it’s so important to keep cameras on and be present. To learn more about how we eliminate unnecessary meetings, take a look at our guidelines in this post from our CEO Mohannad Ali. Part of why this works is that we don’t have a meeting culture here at Hotjar.

You can demonstrate trust in your team by managing outcomes versus people. In other words, don’t fixate on how many hours employees are online each day or how often they check in. When employees work from home, there will always be distractions. Yet the most effective one-on-one calls aren’t just about monitoring productivity. They can also be powerful means of keeping remote employees motivated and engaged. It’s important to set clear expectations when discussing productivity standards with your remote team.

Company

For example, we practice Agile software development methods so our development team is in daily scrum meetings together. The ability to clearly communicate both verbally and in writing is a big factor for us when making hiring decisions. Complete autonomy at work, building trust, and offering your full support to the team. At ProductPlan, we’ve set up a #pet channel on Slack, hold lighting talks, and assign Zoom coffee breaks between different employees.

And, don’t forget to cascade messages from company leadership to the rest of your team to maintain transparency and instill confidence about your organization’s future. Consistency is the only way to build a reputation or a brand. If someone is always late for meetings I will expect him to be late every time. If someone is consistently sharing a clear vision and empowering others to accomplish it, I will trust that vision.

Rotate meeting times so that the inconvenience of having a meeting either too late or too early in the day does not fall on one employee. When employees come to the office in the morning, it’s easy to discuss ideas with them when you meet at the cafeteria or wait for a meeting to start. However, when they work remotely, it’s easy to neglect such engagement.

One of your most important duties is to ensure that there are well-documented procedures in place for damn-near everything. Ensure that all employees know where to find these documents , and then use them. As a manager, before you can hope to determine what is expected of others within a changing environment, you will need to start by looking at what is expected of you. Work that I was super proud of, work that required deep collaboration with teammates in different states and countries.

Team building activities are a fun way to get your remote team talking about topics that might not usually come up during the workday. Whichever activity you choose, be sure to pick something that will get your team out of their comfort zone and encourage dialogue. It’s also important to be clear on how frequently and in what form How to Hire a Remote Team employees should communicate their progress to the rest of the team. For some teams, daily video meetings might be the way to go, for others maybe a few quick Slack messages could suffice. Whatever way your team communicates best, make sure that everyone is aware of the communication expectations and keeps up with deadlines.

Regular communication facilitated by technology—we have people in New Zealand and in Ukraine with a significant time difference, so we use technology to communicate asynchronously. Communication – In the absence of face-to-face conversations, communicating thoroughly, effectively and with respect is the key to working well remotely. This requires the use of text, email, voice, and video communication platforms and shared expectations regarding availability. Everyone must be aware and intentional instead of defaulting to the command and control model.

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Have a good understanding of what needs done, whether a single project or a series of ongoing tasks. Every person has their own preferences for how they absorb new information. If you can, take this into consideration when you’re doing training and development with your team. You may think that communication is an issue easily solved with the various tech-based solutions you’re using. But you’ve probably seen no shortage of research that suggests that most of our communication is non-verbal. So, you need to find ways to compensate for the loss of the non-verbal part of communication.

Resolve the conflict in private – Always try to resolve issues privately. You don’t want to embarrass team members in front of their peers, and it’s not wise to look like you took someone’s side in a personal argument. The better you are at solving problems discreetly, the more trustworthy your team will find you.

Use project management software – Project management software improves transparency by showing the team every step in a workflow. Anyone can check the status of a project or task without bothering a teammate. Hubstaff Tasks even has automated Stand-ups and project roadmaps, which can help to further improve team transparency. You might have to build your way back from a remote company culture that has a lot of issues, and it takes time to even get to a neutral position. As we all know, breaking bread together builds stronger teams. However, it’s a little awkward to set up a video conference inside a restaurant.

Culture Evolves As A Company Grows

It encourages you to give up Command and Control and to let your employees shine at what they do. If you’ve hired the right people, nurtured their talent and left them to do what you hired them to do, you should be reaping the rewards. That means using Communities of Practice for anything that involves things like design, management, remote working, and so forth. If someone is having trouble understanding something, there is a good chance that someone else on the team has already undergone a similar experience and may have a solution to it. The issue can range from attempting to figure out the best solution for remote working to locating the best chair to sit on while working remotely in your home.

Take Time To Focus On Self

Keep a cool head – Learning about an error, especially an expensive or avoidable one, can be frustrating. Fortunately, when you work remotely, you have plenty of space to take a breath and calm down. Pay attention to your hot buttons, too — you might tend to be less patient with specific types of mistakes.

This gives your team members the chance to address any issues they might be afraid to bring up in group meetings, or don’t want to discuss via email for fear of being misunderstood. Treat any virtual meetings as if they were in-person meetings. Have an agenda and a dress code (if that’s what’s usual for you). It’s fine to have informal chats before the meeting starts but establish some ground rules. Instead, focus on your employees’ output – what they did well and accomplished, or what they missed or didn’t complete. In a remote work environment, you have to trust your people, because you simply can’t police them from afar.

The safer you feel, the more inclined you’ll be to trust another person. As humans, we are naturally more inclined to trust who is similar to us. In this article, the Harvard Business Review suggests that one fundamental element of trust is having things in common.