How To Create & Maintain Workplace Trust In Teams Working Remotely

Overview (8 minutes to read): Workplace trust is important and it’s particularly important to nurture this with your team members who are working remotely. Here we explain the benefits of trust in the workplace and what you can do to cultivate this with your remote team.

Why is workplace trust important?

People at high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 40% less burnout, 29% more satisfaction and 50% higher productivity to name a few plus points (“The Neuroscience of Trust” Paul Jack 1)

It has been proven that creating a work culture that nurtures honesty can be key when it comes to engaging employees and reducing turnover. Trust enhances psychological safety, respect and makes employees feel secure in their jobs.

With the #wfh revolution, attaining to satisfy psychological needs virtually has become a challenge that companies must overcome. Lack of trust, not knowing the colleagues, reduced team collaboration, social isolation - just to name a few downsides that organizations with remote teams should address in order to retain employees.

How can companies build workplace trust among remote employees?

Oftentimes companies rely on team building, flexible working, workload, and other incentives, but overlook that the psychological safety cannot be bought, it needs to be cultivated. Especially in virtual teams.

Susanne Jacobs (“The Jacobs Model” below) suggests that there are 8 intrinsic drives that are correlated to psychological well-being in the workplace environment, which ultimately can provide either positive or negative outcomes for your team. When each of the intrinsic drives are fulfilled, the results are seen through increased engagement, boosted well-being and productivity. And vice versa, ignoring these needs, can result in negative outcomes and disengagement from your team.

Here are the 8 intrinsic drives and how they can be satisfied in the remote setting:

1. Belong & connect

If your remote team feels excluded in the workplace it will affect their well-being and the engagement in their role. It’s important to make sure individuals feel like they belong in the company. Remote teams don’t have the opportunity for casual bonding over watercooler conversations. Instead, employees are working solo, even if they are in meetings with colleagues most of the day. However, most meetings don’t allow for bonding moments, so apps like Donut, empowers companies to compensate through creating virtual meaningful relationships among their employees.

2. Voice & recognition

To boost engagement and morale, your team should feel recognized and appreciated for contributing with their ideas in the workplace.

Giving suggestions at work can be complicated, and doing so remotely allows some extra time of consideration before employees share their thoughts. Encouraging employees to brainstorm suggestions in a meeting might not be successful, however, using collaborative whiteboards in small teams (with platforms like Google Jam, Miro or Figma), might allow for employees to express themselves more easily.

3. Significance & positions

Your team will be more productive when there is structure in place. Clearly knowing their day-to-day tasks and having an established team can improve performance levels. Having doubts regarding how they can get their work done on a daily basis, might evoke negative feelings toward their role and your company altogether.

4. Fairness

It is critical for your company to treat your remote team fairly and consistently as this avoids low productivity and disengagement.

All employees should be treated fairly - and relationships are just as important as compensation. For remote teams, this can be shown through fair recognition among employees, flexibility that applies to all departments, opportunities for everyone to give suggestions and to take them into consideration etc.

5. Learn & challenge

To be able to adapt in the fast-changing work environment there has to be space for learning and upgrading within the working hours. Providing opportunity for growth and development has been key in attracting and retaining employees, and research supports this: employees who are challenged are more productive and more likely to reach their potential.

6. Choice & autonomy

Giving your team a sense of control over their workplace delivery will provide an unexpected benefit, as Paul Jack puts it in The Neuroscience of Trust

““Autonomy also promotes innovation, because different people try different approaches. Often, younger or less experienced employees will be your chief innovators, because they’re less constrained by what “usually” works.”

7. Security & certainty

To feel confident in their role and the company’s future, leaders should be as transparent as possible. In these uncertain times, employees who fear for the future of their role might lack in performance and productivity due to high stress. Regular meetings with your team to discuss the company’s goals and steps towards achieving those goals, along with building trust as mentioned above, might alleviate the anxiety of security and certainty in the workplace.

8. Purpose

Creating a sense of purpose is a collaborative effort between your company and the employee itself. Connecting the dots from the employee’s contributions to the ultimate results and success is a good way to start. Regardless of the channel through which it’s announced, setting some time in the diary to appreciate the contributions from your team members can go a long way.

To learn more about the science behind trust in the workplace the two articles used to underpin this post are below.

Sources:

1 Zack, P. J. (2021, August 31). The Neuroscience of Trust. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust

2 Jacobs, S. (2013), "Trust – the performance currency", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-08-2013-0083