Having remote teams became increasingly common across many industries since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While this work setup offers plenty of benefits, it also comes with many challenges. In particular, trust — which is key to every successful team — is difficult to foster among remote team members since people cannot come together and see each other face to face. Fortunately, there are strategies that you can use to meet this challenge.
Read also: How to securely improve employee efficiency while working from home
1. Develop a work from home policy
A great first step to building trust within your remote team is to create a remote work policy. This policy should provide guidance to the team by detailing the following:
- Responsibilities of a remote worker
- Permitted equipment and apps
- Security measures that must be implemented
- Method and frequency of team communication and collaboration
- Administrative processes
- Unacceptable employee behaviors and their resulting consequences
- Type of support that the company will provide a remote worker
Seeing is believing, so having a remote work policy in place will clarify many things and stop staff from feeling like they're moving in the dark. Specifically, your employees will know what they're obliged to do and what you expect of them. Moreover, they'll be able to move more freely within the bounds of their privileges.
2. Keep everyone on the same page in terms of workload
During your regular team alignment meetings, ask each member to share about their workload and priorities. Find out the status of their current assignments, the difficulties they are encountering, and how the team can help. By letting the whole team know each other’s priorities and holding everyone accountable for their respective responsibilities, you will promote transparency, which is an essential ingredient of trust.
3. Leverage different communication and collaboration tools
Communication is integral to building trust in any relationship. This is why you need to equip your team with communication and collaboration tools, such as:
- Audio and video conferencing – Zoom, Skype
- Chat – Slack, WhatsApp
- Project management – Asana, Trello
- Email – Gmail, Outlook
Make sure to carefully select the communication tool that is best suited for your intended purpose. For delicate discussions such as performance reviews, utilize video calls so you can better handle the discussion while reading the other person’s body language and tone of voice. For tracking deadlines and tasks, it is best to use project management tools to keep the entire team aligned.
4. Promote transparent communication
The more open and transparent people are with one another, the more they are able to trust one another.
You can start promoting transparency within your remote team by talking about the company's goals, how it is currently performing, and what steps will be taken to meet its goals. Doing so shows employees that you trust them with the information and that you're not hiding anything from them. In turn, employees would be more encouraged to trust the team and the company as a whole, too.
Moreover, openly share about mistakes that you have made and what you have learned as a result. By doing so, you'll encourage your staff to let down their guard and share their own experiences as well. It may also encourage a discussion on how they can improve and move forward as a team.
Finally, ask team members for feedback. Take note, however, that some members may not feel comfortable sharing their thoughts to the whole team, so you could ask them during one-on-one sessions. You could also leverage tools like Officevibe that allow people to leave feedback anonymously.
The IT experts of Founders Technology Group can help empower you with tools and tech services to ensure your remote team’s success. Connect with us today.