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How to Build Trust with Remote Teams
How can I build trust with my team working remotely?
Trust in the workplace essentially refers to our confidence in people’s ability to get things done, as promised.
If you need to ask this question, it signals one or more of three things.
- Your company culture is toxic.
- You’re hiring the wrong people.
- You’re a control-freak micromanager.
And here’s how.
Your Company Culture
Trust-based company cultures don’t lock people up in what Basecamp’s Jason Fried calls a ‘presence prison’.
People aren’t required to signal their productivity by showing their face in the office, or on Slack and Zoom. These are poor surrogates for actual productivity and can paradoxically also have a negative effect on it.
Trust-based cultures, like the ones epitomized by Amazon and Netflix, give their people autonomy. They communicate asynchronously instead of in realtime because this gives their people time to actually think — what they were hired to do in the first place.
And they operate on conviction, not consensus-seeking meeting after meeting, which might serve to decrease the frequency of bad decisions in the short term, but in the…
