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Before COVID-19 made home working mandatory, the practice was, in the minds of many leaders, synonymous with slacking – getting up late, staying in pajamas, watching breakfast TV, walking the dog and playing golf. As unfair as it may seem, three inextricable factors shaped this stereotype: a long-standing over-dependence on presentee-based management methods, a distrust of virtual workers and obstructive senior leaders with very little working from home experience.
During these past few months, however, senior diehards have experienced it and learned – somewhat to their surprise – that most people do their work while at home and few use it as a means of hiding or shirking their responsibilities. In fact, as many suspected all along, the risk is to overwork people, not underwork them.
Trust issues
We know from research that trust is a fundamental bedrock of organizational performance for knowledge-based enterprises. Without trust, an organization’s foundations and brickwork crumble. A new study by the Advanced Workplace Institute (AWI) and Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa), summarised in a previous post, warns that trust is fundamental to the cohesion and effectiveness of virtual working. Organizations risk destroying that trust if their leaders and people do not evolve the relevant understandings, skills and practices.
According to the research, trust is the firm belief in the truth, ability or reliability in someone or something. There are many dimensions of trust in an enterprise. Firstly, there’s trust in the organization and its senior leaders to act in the group's interests rather than their own. Without this trust, people cannot wholeheartedly commit their energy to the organization or place their trust in the leadership.
For leaders in a changing world, this is more of a challenge than it may first seem. If market conditions require changes in strategy leaders may have to go back on previous commitments. In turn, this can give rise to a lack of confidence and low morale. People are looking for a baseline of knowledge, reliability and confidence in their leaders. If these qualities are missing, the foundations of any organization or culture will weaken.
Then there’s trust in one another, which is about belief. Someone who is highly trusted tends to do what they say they’ll do. The quality and reliability of the information they provide colleagues also have a part to play. People who consistently deliver correct, thoughtful and well-researched information will gain others' trust. This belief is reinforced through colleagues swapping stories and other positive experiences.
Emotions play a part too. There’s something powerful about the feeling that a colleague respects and cares about your interests. In other words, an employee who continually fails to keep promises and delivers subpar work will often find that colleagues ignore or bypass them.
None of this is new, of course. It was as true before the pandemic as it will be after. The big difference now, however, is that people working virtually spend less time in the same physical space as one another. This provides them with fewer cues to understand what is going on with colleagues, other business units or the organization as a whole. They only pick up snippets of information from peers on calls, through emails or company communications. The people deemed trustworthy before the pandemic will likely continue to thrive in this virtual world. Others may see their value diminish, as their input is second-guessed or ignored by skeptical colleagues.
People will always have challenges in workload or domestic situations, causing them to miss the occasional meeting or deliver poor-quality work. But highly trusted team members will be given the benefit of the doubt in situations where unreliable colleagues might not receive the same good will.
Competence or commitment?
When people work away from one another, distinguishing between the two principle types of trust is essential. The first is a cognition-based trust related to competence – do you believe that team members are capable of doing their work away from the office and without supervision? The second is an affect-based trust that centers commitment – do you believe that team members will do their tasks, manage their own time appropriately and work in the best interests of their colleagues or the organization?
Maintaining cognition-based trust enhances collaboration on team tasks because trust in each other’s skills and competencies leads to confidence. On the other hand, nurturing affect-based trust creates an environment in which colleagues feel safe to share ideas and sensitive information.
Every virtual worker will have unique challenges.
Don’t leave it to chance
The research suggests that virtual workers need to take ownership of their ‘trustability’ to be effective and valuable to the team. Individuals should imagine that everyone is on a trust index, a score that represents how colleagues rate their trustability at any given moment.
Taking control of your trust index score is vital. This means making promises that you can keep. It’s about proactively keeping the team’s interest at heart and communicating with precision, empathy and sensitivity.
But what about a person’s ability to trust someone else? Every second of every day, we make judgments about the people and information around us. In a virtual world, where we can’t see what’s going on in a colleague’s life, we may need to suspend our judgments and, on occasion, give people the benefit of the doubt.
If ostensibly untrustworthy behavior prevails, leaders need to demonstrate empathy first. A sensitive chat with the team member will help you understand why trust has broken down. Another crucial step is to develop clear agreements between colleagues about when and how the team works. Doing this will set expectations around commitments and when people are available. Team members will work asynchronously, so leaders need to encourage realistic expectations and deadlines. This factor should also spur healthy methods of conflict resolution to stop trust from breaking down.
The study by AWI and CEBMa found that virtual teams have to work harder than their office-based counterparts to build and maintain trust. Virtual leaders should make a conscious effort to ensure that their staff develop the cohesion and predictability that make it possible.
Virtual working represents the future. To avoid being left behind, leaders need to let go of their old habits and behaviors and give people the support they need to flourish. That begins with trust.
