Anne Truitt Zelenka

What is the critical ingredient in the performance of virtual teams? It’s not communication; it’s trust. Trust mediates the relationship between communication and performance. In the absence of trust, more communication will not help your virtual team function better. Here’s a PowerPoint describing some of the relevant research.

Why is trust so important to the functioning of virtual teams? I can think of a number of reasons why this might be:

Lack of face time. When team members are scattered geographically, you can’t be sure when or whether your teammates are working. They can slack off if they want and you might never know it.

Solution: workstreaming.

Networked individualism. People are ever more likely to act as autonomous individuals in the world with multiple affiliations to different projects and possibly even to multiple companies. You can’t be sure their interests align with yours, with your company’s, or with your particular project’s. How do you know they’ll keep your team’s interests as high priority as you like? There are no guarantees that they’re not doing things that benefit some other interest of theirs.

Solution: Expect and accept that team members will, in fact, have different priorities and interests than yours or than the team’s as a whole. Managers should understand the values and opinions of team members, not try to convert them by power of charisma or will.

Asynchronous text communications. Email especially is known for coming across as curt and rude even when people don’t mean it that way. This makes it all the harder to develop team relationships, when so much discussion takes place by asynchronous text.

Solution: Use instant messaging, phone calls, and status updaters like Twitter to keep team members in closer touch with less risk of offense.

Missing social context. When you work in the same office as your teammates you know when someone’s ill or otherwise going through hard times. You get to know teammates’ working rhythms and styles in a way that’s difficult to replicate virtually. The social context allows you to give your teammates more leeway in their work when they need it. When you don’t have the social context, your expectations may be at times set too high for teammates to reach.

Solution: social networking tools.

How is trust built?

Building trust requires different techniques and team member actions at different points in time. In the early team-building phase, social communication, shared enthusiasm, and managing technical uncertainty are important. Also, individual team members need to show initiative.

In later phases, team members need to have predictable communications with detailed and timely responses to any issues that arise in the course of collaborative work. When crises or conflicts occur, leaders should react with calmness, not overemotionality. The team needs to transition from social connection to procedural definition and then to task focus and completion.

What if trust deteriorates?

Sometimes when trust disappears — or when it was never developed in the first place — you need to go back to the first steps. Start with social connection and building enthusiasm. Deal with any lingering issues over technical problems and procedures for completing the work that needs doing. Ensure each team member is showing autonomous initiative.

Also, remember the Gottman ratio. Researcher John Gottman found that in marital relationships, the balance of interactions needs to be overwhelmingly positive in order for the couple to perceive the relationship as positive. In fact, the ratio of positive to negative interactions needs to be as high as five or six to one because people focus on negative interactions in their assessment. This could be applied to team managing as well. Just a few negative trust-destroying interactions even among many positive ones can make the team members’ assessment of the team negative. So realize to make up for negative incidents you will have to engage in multiplied positive trust-building interactions.