Over a year into the pandemic with virtual work as normality, company cultures reveal a lack of trust among the remote managers and employees. Many supervisors haven’t been trained to manage their employees remotely. Therefore, many over-monitor their employees, which tends to backfire. Without in-person interactions, there is more room to make negative and often unfounded assumptions about colleagues as well.
This lack of trust will not be magically fixed when the pandemic is over, especially as businesses are considering new models to work remotely permanently. This culture of mistrust has significant effects, including diminished productivity, innovation and motivation. But even while working remotely, there are steps to effectively rebuild this trust.
Before the pandemic at the workplace, trust was planted with simple small talks after the meetings, a greeting in the elevator, or complimenting a haircut. Trust is built by spending time together around non-work-related tasks. Social bonds are built by expressing verbal and nonverbal communication in ways that trigger understanding and shared concern. Zoom calls cannot replace the depth of in-person human interactions. Through calls it is harder to build connections, and misunderstandings are likelier to arise. Facial expressions on Zoom meetings can be easily misinterpreted as you are not sharing the same physical space. Someone’s face might be misread because their kid might be doing something that annoyed them in the background. When we don’t have all the context about someone’s behavior, we are likely to mark their actions to their character, rather than a situation beyond their control. This psychological phenomenon is called fundamental attribution error.
Managers might decide to supervise someone more closely when they make a negative assumption about an employee’s behavior. As a result, this employee gets psychological distress, which harms the performance. Monitoring is interpreted by the employee as not being trusted to do their work. When leaders start to monitor, employees are less motivated and feel less responsible for their own work. The increased autonomy with working remotely can boost productivity, but only if supervisors trust their team to perform.
There are two types of trust: competence trust, which relates purely to professional abilities, and interpersonal trust, which is based on human connections. If someone delivers quality work, but is not very sociable, this undermines personal trust. People need to send reliable signals of trustworthiness in both these dimensions.
There are also two types of trust personalities. Automatic trusters give the benefit of the doubt until trust is broken and evidence-based trusters tend not to trust until they are given reason to do so. Providing more communication and information than necessary to new colleagues is probably the safer way to provide a base of trust when you don’t know what type they are.
To build trust, firms need to educate leaders around how trust works in remote environments, where people are likely to feel more disconnected. Leaders need to make people feel included, make sure their ideas are heard and empathize with them when they are stressed. Managers who show employees support and appreciation foster more trust.
