Fostering Trust and Collaboration in Remote Teams
In 2001 a group of software engineers signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in which they proclaimed a preference for:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
So critical, in their view, was the need for trust and collaboration amongst teammates to deliver results in the software industry that “Individuals and interactions” topped their now infamous list.
Yet, despite them also highlighting the importance of “responding to change,” many teams have struggled — and continue to struggle — with maintaining trust and collaboration following their sudden transition to remote work necessitated by the global coronavirus pandemic.
Most of the discussion on the effects of remote work has tended to focus on the individual level (reduced stress, no commuting, more time spent with family, etc.) and the societal level (reduced carbon emissions, the impact on public transport, etc.), with much less attention being paid to the effects on the organisational level.
But group level effects undoubtedly exist and are indeed usually quite pronounced, which won’t surprise anyone familiar with the 30+ years of research pointing to the powerful effects physical proximity has on workforce cohesion and productivity.
In surveys conducted on the challenges faced by virtual teams, two interpersonal-related themes commonly arise:
- A lack of trust, and
- A lack of collaboration.
Leaders of virtual teams need to remain mindful of these issues and be proactive in fostering an environment that allows trust and collaboration to flourish, or prepare to face the inevitable consequences of decreased workforce satisfaction and productivity.
As is so often the case, communication is the solution to fixing these issues or avoiding them in the first place.
A Lack of Trust Amongst Team Members
A modern startup team, by its very nature, involves interdependent work. The designer depends on the front-end engineer, who depends on the back-end engineer, who depends on the data scientist, who depends on the DevOps engineer; and so on, such that, in reality, everyone depends on everyone.
And interdependent work cannot exist without trust, which is the willingness to rely on others under conditions of risk or vulnerability. If an individual is to give her best, she must believe that her colleagues are equally giving theirs, otherwise she will lack the appropriate incentives.
In an office setting, trust is baked into the environment. Information about what others are doing is all around us and obtained passively. We can tell when a colleague is engaged in deep work or when they’re browsing /r/CatsStandingUp.
By contrast, distributed team members can go long periods of time without acquiring any new information about what their colleagues are doing at any give moment, or on any given day.
The solution is to deliberately create awareness. This may sound obvious, but it takes effort to effectively increase and maintain awareness amongst distributed team members. However, once such awareness reaches a sufficient level, trust will flourish, and with it individual satisfaction and team productivity.
Awareness Mechanisms
Researchers in virtual team productivity have advocated the use of “awareness mechanisms” as a means of increasing information flows related to individual team member productivity. There are a number of different types of awareness mechanisms, but the most important is activity awareness, which describes information about what a particular team member is doing at any given moment.
Since awareness is not automatic in distributed teams, group members need to make extra efforts to regularly communicate their work progress to their teammates.
At Playfair, we do this every morning by each listing the tasks we plan to tackle that day on our #dailystandup Slack channel.
However, we recognise that this is often not sufficient to build extreme trust amongst virtual team members. We have dozens of other Slack groups related to virtually every project that is ongoing at Playfair, each of which gets filled throughout the week with updates from team members, including what specific progress they’ve made and what new learnings they’ve acquired.
As Playfair’s Head of Talent, I often spend weeks on end embedded with recent investee companies, helping the founders to build out their early team. Naturally enough, each of our startups gets its own Slack channel and whenever I complete a big chunk of work, I share the details of what I’ve achieved with my team:
But sharing information with ones colleagues is not sufficient to foster extreme trust in virtual teams. Each person must also be willing to request information from others. People can be busy and may not be aware that their coworkers may want to know what they’re working on (which of course is their right in an interdependent work environment). If I’m collaborating with one of my founders on a hiring project, I’ll often message them asking how many of their agreed tasks they’ve completed and when they expect the rest to be done, as well as share my own progress.
And of course, we operate open calendars at Playfair, so that everyone can see what their colleagues are working on at all times.
Finally, availability awareness is also important for distributed teams. Since the start of the pandemic we’ve always encouraged our team members to call each other for informal conversations if someone’s calendar has an open slot. I genuinely love it when one of my colleagues calls me during an open slot in my calendar and I get to show them what obscure academic paper I’ve got my head buried in (sorry this is a Playfair in-joke).
A Lack of Collaboration Amongst Team Members
Collaboration is king, as the old saying goes, but it’s much easier to collaborate when people are situated in the same office. Experiment after experiment, mostly studying the collaborative efforts of researchers and scientists, has shown that the physical proximity of workspace (whether in large companies or academic institutions) correlates with likelihood of collaborating.
Remote teams are great when collaboration amongst colleagues is unnecessary for the business to achieve its goals; but find me a modern startup that doesn’t need its staff to collaborate intensely in order to find novel solutions to complex problems.
Any seasoned entrepreneur or people manager knows that the real magic happens when you put smart people in a room together and give them problems to solve, with minimal direction. That’s because creativity, an essential component of problem solving, operates best under as few constraints as possible.
The main problem with virtual team collaboration, as with virtual team trust, is that communication is its driving force, and virtual work drastically decreases the frequency of communication, as conversations rarely happen by chance encounter, as is so often the case with physical proximity. In an office environment, it takes so little effort for colleagues to initiate conversations with each other.
Technology has done its best to bridge this communication gap, but of course it’s still less likely that these forms of communication will lead to the sorts of spontaneous conversations from which unplanned collaboration emerges.
The limitations of video calls (relative at least to real-life encounters), especially the asymmetries between what each person on the call can see and hear, prevent highly fluid conversations from occurring. However, I find that when all parties are using modern equipment and have superfast Internet connections, such conversations can come pretty close to in person interactions.
It’s a frequent occurrence for companies to pay for their workers’ home internet connection. I really do encourage companies to ensure that their employees have superfast internet connections at home, even if upgrading comes at the company’s expense.
Even if everyone has the right equipment, many people find it strange to call a colleague out of the blue, without something specific to talk about. But as I previously mentioned, we do it all of the time at Playfair. Especially on Fridays, when I try to keep most of my calendar free, I often jump on video calls with one of my colleagues and talk about literally anything that comes to mind. More often than not, we end up talking about specific business-related topics and coming up with interesting and useful solutions to problems one or both of us was facing.
As a manager, if your team members aren’t engaging in these types of behaviours, it’s your job to make them happen. And the best way for a leader to encourage a specific type of behaviour is to engage in it themselves. So get dialling!
