I know that, today, I have a whole company based on helping people to hire remote workers, but I will confess to you my dirtiest secret yet. I used to have a problem with remote hires. It wasn’t about their skills or experience; it was about trust.
How would I know that they were doing their jobs? It is not like we can sneak peek into their offices as we could with local hires. What if they are just goofing around?
If they were in the same time zones as me, that would be super easy, barely an inconvenience: I could just ask my team to tie themselves into their chairs and watch them work with their webcams 🙂
Trust issues in remote work are pretty basic when you break them down. On one side, remote workers feel their managers aren’t being open with them. On the other side, managers worry about whether their team is actually working. It’s that simple.
Research brings up the same trust issues regarding remote work – repeatedly.
- The Disconnect: 85% of leaders doubt remote productivity while 87% of employees say they’re productive
- Management Concerns: 43% of executives worry about remote team effort; 40% lack confidence in employee motivation without direct oversight
- Employee Perspective: One-third of remote workers fear excessive monitoring, while many report feeling left out of important communications (Buffer)
So, there you have the bone of contention as far as trust in a remote team goes.
The funny thing is, everyone agrees that remote work, actually “works”. Still, the above (I’d say minor) constraints can wreak havoc on the whole system.
The reality is that when employees feel trusted, they report higher levels of motivation, productivity, happiness with their lives, and engagement. They will also feel much less stressed out, miss work less, and feel less burned out.
Remote workers are not stop-gap hires but prized employees who should be set up for their own and the company’s success. A culture of trust makes your team more productive and flexible. That means promoting a culture of knowledge sharing and transparency that’ll bring out the best in them.
6 Strategies to Build a Culture of Trust in Your Virtual Team
Building trust in virtual teams begins by having the right foundation. From tracking outcomes rather than hours to maintaining consistent communication, these five key strategies help your team to develop strong connections and deliver results from a distance.
1. Know Your Virtual Tools
Since you are not in the same time zone with your remote team, you may need a virtual workspace to get everyone on the same page.
With a virtual workspace, not only you will be able to communicate with your hire, but to measure the progress of the work as well.
Tools like Monday or ClickUp create Lists of Tasks and Subtasks on which you can check their progress every day, at any hour.
You can check the Status of any of their Tasks in order to measure the progress of your remote team
2. Track Their Results, not Time
After all, why should we focus on productivity rather than how workers spend their time working?
Many managers have debated this subjected in Reddit (you can check their thread here) and here’s what they found out:
- Focus on customers’ satisfaction and tasks being done: Many managers realized that, since the tasks have been done and their customers are happy, they had no more reason to worry unnecessarily with time spent on each task. Slight_Manufacturer6 said that, as a manager, he doesn’t worry about how his remote workers spend their free time, as long as they have finished their tasks and their customers are delighted. backcounty1029, as an owner, expressed that he cares more with tasks being done and with customer experience rather than the free time of his techs.
- Virtual Team’s well-being comes first: Many of the redditors emphasized the need to invest for their hires’ mental and physical health, since it leads to more productivity and satisfaction. GeneMoody-Action1 amusingly said that, if you are not invested in the health of your workers, mental and physical, then you should have raised livestock for a living vs management, and shared their own personal experience of walking away from a big salary to feel treated like a human being and not as a machine.
Can you imagine losing a big shot employee because he feels bad working for you?
- Autonomy and flexibility: Some redditors added they allowed their teams to work at their own time schedules instead of tracking every minute. That gives them autonomy and flexibility to work at their fullest at the time it suits them better. bisskits do not track his virtual team, but, as a manager, pays them to fulfill their roles. bkb74k3 even asks his techs to record 100 hours per month of billable time, but he doesn’t require work hours or time in office; because he valuables customer experience more. As long the client is happy…
- It is hard to measure worktime: Let’s be honest: tracking people’s times is an ungrateful job and it doesn’t pay very well. This was acknowledged by many managers, especially in multitask environments. cutepenguin1337 told his personal experience with ADHD and how hard it is to allocate time to each customer with accuracy. RoddyBergeron and UsedCucumber4 even said that it is impossible to record 100% of the billable hours.
In summary, you are going to waste your time and your money tracking your virtual team’s work time and they won’t be productive as much.
Instead of micromanaging them, just let them do their job and relax. If your customers are happy, they will keep paying you their money, so don’t worry.
3. Daily Communication
This is a thing that I had learned with people who lead Scrum-type projects. We, as employers and managers, are anxious by nature. We need constant reassurance from our hires that their salaries are well-spent money.
And the next best thing closer to a platform that shows us who works and who doesn’t is an employee who tells us exactly what they’ve been doing (for the sake of the project, of course, we don’t want to privy their business).
Instruct your virtual team, as soon as they wake up, to answer to you three questions (by audio or text, your call):
- What have you done yesterday for the sake of the project?
- What are you going to do today for the sake of the project?
- What are the difficulties and obstacles that you are facing while working on the project?
This small daily report will help you both in many ways:
- Building Trust: You will receive daily reassurance that your remote worker is committed to his tasks.
- Friendly Reminder: Your remote worker will recap what he has been doing and what he needs to do next; if he knows what he has to do, he doesn’t have to goof around!
- Removing Obstacles: If the obstacles come from his side, you will be able to plan in advance and compensate for it until he fixes it. If the obstacles come from your side, you can remove it asap, so your team will be able to pursue its objectives with ease.
4. Share “secrets” with your distributed team
Sharing relevant information with your remote workers is an act of inclusion. Knowing that you trust them will make your distributed team feel like a part of the company.
Okay, if you think that “feeling part of the company” is a “fluffy” idea – exactly what we said we aren’t doing, then get this. According to the 2018 Trust Outlook (pdf), when asked what US employees would do if they trusted their company’s leadership, here’s what they said:
- 21% would work longer hours
- 23% would offer better ideas
- 25% would be better team players
- 23% would be more loyal
- 7% would take a pay cut
The same report says 28% of employees cited transparency as the number one reason for staying longer with a company.
The HackerRank Report states that coming up with creative solutions is something developers look for in a role. But they only follow through if they feel trusted.
And finally, a report (pdf) from Great Place to Work called the Business Case for a High-Trust Culture shows that when employees trust the company, they deliver greater than average results overall – even financially.
5. Measure Your Metrics
Attach your goals of the month to a metric that will measure your remote team’s results.
For instance, Netflix uses as a North Star Metric their binge-watching metrics, which includes the number of episodes watched in one sitting, the percentage of people who binge-watch, and the amount of time spent binge-watching.
Do not attach your goals of the month to your revenue, because there are many factors that can impact this goal and may not be under the reach of your team.
Instead, choose for a metric which your team can impact directly or indirectly.
Here’s an example:
Which leads us to…
6. Periodic Meeting
It can be done weekly or once every 15 days. This is different from merely Daily Communication or Daily Reports. The way it bridges the gap between and your remote team is very different.
First of all, there are two good reasons why you should plan meetings with your remote team:
- Alignment: your remote hires and you will be on the same page. They will be able to organize themselves towards the goals of the project.
- Relieves anxiety: We are anxious by nature, as I said before. This meeting ensures us that their commitment is not only by their daily tasks, but for the bigger picture.
And the bigger picture is the central objective of the project, of the company as a whole.
If we don’t have a very clear and concrete objective for the fulfillment of a project, we start to lose track of the things that matter the most.
This is why the objective must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.
Let’s say you have a marketing sales remote team: would you prefer them to raise your sales or make your Instagram clean and fashionable?
Do not look at me like that, I would like to have them both as well!
But a clean and fashionable Instagram is not a SMART objective. For example: it is hard to tell when an Instagram channel would go viral. It can take weeks, months or even years!
It is smarter to make them find more qualified leads or to remarketing your already established clientele; make them aware of that every meeting.
Here are the questions you and your remote team have to answer on these meetings:
And this is the time where you let your remote team be aware of any change of course for the project.
These periodic meetings should take around 25 to 30 minutes. If it takes longer, there is something wrong happening.
Look, I know, it is a ton of information to digest. At first glance, it seems easier to get out of your room, check your office and scold a local hire who seems to be procrastinating. It worked so far, so what gives?
Yes, hiring a new remote worker demands from you a new set of skills. But as you may have noticed already, by measuring the project over tasks being done and metrics, it will only make your company more effective while delivering you better results and high value.
And if you are still unsure about hiring remote workers because you feel like you need guidance on management, you can always hire your remote worker from Distant Job. Here, we offer you 100% free consultancy on how to manage workers from a specialist who has been doing that for twenty years straight, way before it was cool.
It works very simply: we have a meeting, I learn about your company and its culture. And I will headhunt the best match for your company. It is really that simple and we are so confident that you will be satisfied that, if you are not satisfied in three months, we return your money, no questions asked.
Plus, I have been thinking of offering my consultancy as a paid service as well, for those who don’t have hired our awesome remote workers (and those who hire from us still will enjoy our consultancy for free). Would you like to have my best advice for your company and your specific situation? Let me know about it and book a call today.
