TOP TIPS: Establishing trust in virtual teams

Friday, May 12, 2006

Trust is the foundation for teamwork and collaboration, whether face-to-face or in virtual teams. But trust is hard to establish, especially when teams are frequently changing and team members haven't had long to gel. Here, Debbie Lawley offers five top tips for establishing trust in virtual teams.

1. Keep it simple:What you might try and achieve with a co-located team may not work with a virtual team. Keep the teams small (10 core contributors is ideal) and give them a reasonable, well-defined scope of operation, rather than working with a large team and too many complex interrelationships. In a small team, there will be fewer relationships to handle and trust will be easier to establish.

2. Have good leadership: A good leader - of anything, not just virtual teams - will build trust through merging individual cultures and personalities into a team culture. In a virtual team there's a need for good leadership and trust in their ability. Organize face to face meetings to establish the team's base and discover personalities and let people meet who they're going to be working with virtually. The real work will only start after that first face to face meeting.

3. Maintain the team: Have you ever been in a work situation with a high staff turnover? New people coming and going all the time breeds distrust in teams and departments. In a virtual team, this effect is amplified.

Even though the size of a team will no doubt flex throughout a project, it's important to try and maintain the members as best you can. Aim to minimize the turnover and let team members build relationships. Beware that changing team members deep into a virtual team project may impact trust and have a negative effect on the team and it's ultimate goal.

4. Keep a balance of skills and personalities: should you choose team members that are alike or different in skills and personality? The answer is to have both and have a good balance of people in your team. Being like each other raises the degree of trust among members although it also reduces diversity. You need a mix of people to create and innovate.

5. Trust people and they'll do better jobs: If you trust people to get on with their work, most will do it more effectively than they would do with someone hovering over them. This applies to virtual teams too. Perceiving people to be high performers also reduces the likelihood that they'll renege on tasks and so increases trust.

Adapted from: Establishing trust in virtual teams at Orange, By Debbie Lawley, in the May/June issue of KM Review.
By Debbie Lawley, Willow Transformations
Source: The Source -

Blogged on 2:32 AM by Upay

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