How to Build Trust in a Remote Team
Building trust is crucial for any successful team, especially when working remotely. Creating a sense of connection within virtual teams is essential for achieving success. Every team member should feel included, regardless of their location. Starting meetings with tailored discussions can encourage group connections and build rapport.
Additionally, asking colleagues in different time zones when it’s best for them to participate in meetings is essential. Establishing a solid rhythm of communication for your team and regularly checking in with remote workers can help build trust. When team members trust each other, they feel comfortable being vulnerable and admitting mistakes and weaknesses. Teams that exchange feedback in a structured environment can identify strengths and weaknesses without fear of repercussions.
Functional teams engage in ideological conflict, and trust is necessary for feedback to be effective. Teams should seek out sources of conflict instead of avoiding them, and high-performing teams hold each other accountable to high-performance standards. Focusing on team results, not individual milestones, is important, as individuals know their peers will call them out if their poor performance hurts the team.
Encouraging a culture of innovation involves trusting individuals to recognize and pursue opportunities. An authentic culture of innovation should not differentiate between operations and invention. Innovation is unpredictable, and a certain level of variation and divergence is necessary for a healthy self-renewal ecosystem. It’s important to take risks during good and bad times and to combine the functions of developers, testers, and operators into one continuous process to achieve innovation.
Assuming trust as a default position can lead to more freedom, increased learning, and better performance. It’s crucial to share decisions and their rationale so others can learn too. Consensus is impossible at scale and must reflect how adaptive systems work. Creating an environment where it’s safe to try and fail can lead to extraordinary growth and learning.
In a changing world, centralized control can be too slow and disconnected from reality. Authority should be pushed to the edge of the organization, where the information is so that teams can adapt and steer. Self-managed teams can be lean and multidisciplinary, containing all or most of the skills they need to achieve their mission.
