By Dr. Wanda Curlee
Faculty Member, School of Business, American Public University
Confidence, reliability, belief in someone and dependability are all synonyms of how we might describe trust. Merriam Webster defines trust as “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.”
But why is trust so much more important for the virtual project team? Just four to five months ago, virtual project management and virtual teams were being discussed in articles, but not to the extent that we have seen recently. COVID-19 has significantly changed our business landscape.
Technology has helped with virtual project teams, however. Today, groups can be all over the world and effectively communicate so that work gets done.
Trust is not all about communication. While communication can happen quickly, it can also break down trust. How can a project manager help increase trust between remote team members when they cannot communicate face-to-face?
The Science behind Creating Trust
In a recent Forbes article, leadership strategist Andrew Mawson noted that in a traditional work environment, you could see what was going on and had a sense of security, which enhanced trust. If you needed something, you could get up from your workspace and walk over to the person who had the information to find answers quickly.
You could even stop by and chat with your co-workers or boss when you wanted a break or you did not know where to get the information you needed.
But that sense of security disappears in a virtual environment. Or does it?
In the virtual environment, your team needs to rely on email and chat messages. The written way to communicate can be difficult, however, and nuances may be lost.
This loss can be due to various reasons:
· English may not be the first language of the person.
· The writer assumes the person reading a message knows what is being discussed.
· Parts of the discussion are left to the reader’s interpretation rather than being clearly stated.
Unfortunately, miscommunications lead to misunderstandings and wrong interpretations, which can lead to tensions in the team and among individuals. As a result, the team’s ability to do its best work is hampered.
Trust, Professionalism and Information Sharing Are Drivers for Virtual Teams
A study mentioned in Mawson’s Forbes article found that trust, along with professional friendliness and information sharing, is a significant driver for a virtual team. These qualities are all interrelated.
For example, employees must feel that they can create positive relationships in their work environment. Some managers have a difficult time creating a positive relationship with employees in a traditional brick-and-mortar office setting.
These managers may believe that just showing up to work is fine; there is no need to develop relationships. But solid relationships help to establish trust.
Positive relationships are created that way. With trust, employees are willing to share their knowledge. Also, employees feel like other employees and supervisors have their back.
There must be a sense of solid trust between employees and supervisors. Trust goes both ways: supervisors need to believe in their employees as well.
Information sharing is essential on a virtual project. When an employee is going to be late or early with a deliverable, this information MUST be shared.
Also, the employee or team downstream that is relying on your deliverable must know if that work is delayed. Delayed work will in turn affect any downstream deliverable and eventually affect the project’s schedule. Without keeping fellow teammates informed, trust erodes quickly.
Steps to Establish Trust
In the Science for Work blog, writer Paolo Sciacovelli discusses how to create and maintain trust in a virtual environment. Sciacovelli suggests having the new virtual team meet face-to-face to get to know each other.
But in the COVID-19 environment, this type of meeting is unlikely to happen. Instead, a video conferencing system could be used. Let each person take a couple of minutes to talk about themselves. There could even be an ice breaker, such as having each team member share something unusual about themselves.
Seeing each other helps to develop personal relationships, which in turn helps with building trust. Project managers should make sure that the opportunity to meet other team members continues throughout the project.
During the initial “greet and meet,” make sure that team members discuss their skills and what is produced with their abilities. The project manager needs to emphasize that promises need to be kept, deadlines must be honored and team members should comply with the behavior of the company.
Inevitably, there will be times when deliverables will be late. But those team members on the project will understand that late deliverables sometimes happen. The key to maintaining trust is to communicate information early and often, even if it is bad news.
Virtual project managers and team leads must be transparent with information and the team. Showing data from the project management tools will help to explain to team members where a project is at any time. Giving this information is not designed to blame individuals, but to show how a project is doing and where the emphasis needs to be placed.
Trust Matters
Virtual project managers make decisions throughout the lifecycle of a project. They are making multiple decisions a day and do not have time to take on added work.
In fact, they need to delegate. Delegation is much easier when there is a sense of trust. Project managers rely on delegation to make sure a project moves forward.
At times, the project manager may have to micromanage. Most individuals do not like to be micromanaged and start to feel that they are not trusted and protect their information by not sharing it.
Without trust, the project manager is forced to overdo communication. When the project manager sends communications in a project without trust, they do not have the time needed to make the necessary decisions. Over time, the morale of the team will most likely suffer.
A project manager who exhibits expertise, confidence and professionalism in what they do will help to establish trust, which will boost morale within the team. The team members can then focus on work and not worry about defending themselves with the project manager or protecting their information from team members. The team members can then learn to rely on each other to get the work done.
There are many ways to establish trust through our actions. Most are common sense. According to Nutcache, some of the ways to build trust are to “demonstrate respect, talk straight, create transparency, clarify expectations, show loyalty, practice accountability at all levels, listen first, show loyalty, keep commitments, extend trust to all team members alike, deliver results.” By doing all these things consistently, the team will come to respect and trust the leadership on a virtual project.
Project Managers Determine the Project Culture
Trust must be earned and given, and a project manager must establish the trustworthy culture of the project. In addition, virtual project managers must keep individuals accountable.
Maintaining accountability demonstrates that the project manager maintains discipline on the project so everyone can get their work done. Belief in each other is needed on every project, but it is essential on virtual projects. Without it, the project cohesion will fall apart, and the project will fail.
Keith Ferrazzi in the Harvard Business Review noted that we, as individuals, tend to listen more to people’s hobbies and interests, more than their skill set. Why? It has to do with wanting to identify with those who have similar likes. Similar likes create trust because people feel that how can an individual who likes what I like not be trustworthy?
In other words, the new relationship is based on trust, which is much better than having to build trust from scratch. When a project manager can have the team start with trust, it is much easier to maintain it.
About the Author
Dr. Wanda Curlee is a Program Director at American Public University. She has over 30 years of consulting and project management experience and has worked at several Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Curlee has a Doctor of Management in Organizational Leadership from the University of Phoenix, an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix, and an M.A. and a B.A. in Spanish Studies from the University of Kentucky. She has published numerous articles and several books on project management.
