First, the form of communication that remote teams use most frequently is text-based — whether it’s through email, instant messaging, or discussions within a project management app. Misunderstandings are common; we might think we’re good at interpreting text-based messages, but research shows we get it wrong half the time, so it’s surprising that remote teams don’t experience conflict more often.

Another challenge is time zone differences. Colleagues aren’t always available whenever you need them, and scheduling a phone call, conference or other real-time conversation can require some planning.

Given that conflict is inevitable, especially for remote teams, what can we do to minimize the damage?

#1 Unreliable Technology

One cause of conflict is unreliable technology. Unexpected downtime and equipment problems will always occur, though we can have backup plans that can help us continue working with little interruption. But interruptions do happen and are, at times, expected. Conflict can occur when these technological malfunctions become excuses to not do the work.

In a study about communication and trust in virtual teams, researchers found that in teams with low trust, it was common practice to blame technology for tardiness or inability to accomplish tasks. This fueled an already existing feeling that the technology was unreliable.

On the other hand, teams with high trust levels found workarounds to technological problems. They notified each other when they’d be available for work, even if there were time zone differences.

If the unreliability of technology is an issue, especially if it’s imagined or exaggerated, it helps to implement a group-wide strategy for dealing with it so that tech failure can no longer be uses as an excuse. Does everyone on the team have a backup Internet connection, for example? If not, are there nearby venues with affordable or free Internet access? If they’re without an Internet connection, should the team send SMS updates via Twitter or a similar service? Or should they send a text message to the project coordinator directly? By having an established system in place, team members can have multiple means of contact that aren’t dependent on a single technology or service.

#2 Loafers

We’ve all been part of a group where at least one person did not contribute much, or at all, during a project. These people are often called free riders or loafers, and their lack of participation can have a negative effect on the team’s performance. But these non-contributing members are rarely malicious or lazy; often, there are barriers that are preventing them from making a proper contribution. For example,  in a study of employee participation at Caterpillar Inc. , employees failed to contribute because of fear of criticism, or the feeling that their contributions are irrelevant or insignificant.

If team members are failing to contribute, ask them privately about their barriers and find ways to remove them. If they feel their work is unimportant, highlight the team’s objective and how crucial each individual’s role is. If the barrier is fear of criticism, then the team should learn how to provide constructive feedback (something we’ll also discuss to in the next section).

The worst things you can do about non-participating members are to accept their lack of participation, or to single them out in front of the group. According to the study on communication and trust mentioned earlier, many low trust teams merely accepted or ignored free riders, giving the impression that a lack of participation wasn’t wrong. Pointing out an individual’s lack of participation in front of the group is also a bad idea, since the team will see this as a betrayal and this may lessen overall trust.

#3 Negative Feedback

Harsh criticism can be a source of major conflict within a remote team, especially if carried out in a text-based medium like email or instant messaging. Two characteristics are present in constructive feedback:

• The message should be substantial. Even if you’re conveying something positive about another person’s work, vague responses like “it’s OK” aren’t helpful. Praise must also be specific, so that individuals can identify the improvements they’ve made and also receive recognition for their successes.
• Any disagreement should be indirect. Instead of flat-out disagreeing with a person or a point, high trust teams tend to offer alternatives, together with explanations as to why they may be preferable. This approach may lessen the fear of criticism, since the target of the feedback is distanced from the person receiving it.

What conflicts have you experienced when working with remote teams? How did you prevent or resolve them?

Photo by stock.xchng user steved_np3

What remote teams actually experience is known as “swift trust“, which happens when you don’t have the time or means to build trust through multiple interactions. Also, you often don’t have prior experience with your colleagues to determine their trustworthiness. You act as if you trust each other from the beginning. While this type of trust cultivates easily, it’s also very fragile. Since all you have are your communication tools — email, phone, instant messaging, video conferencing, etc. — how can you establish and maintain trust using these channels?

Setting the Tone

Your team’s first few messages are crucial to maintaining and developing this “swift trust” into something more sustainable. In a study published in Organization Science, the researchers noted that “The first messages on the team appeared to set the tone for how the team interrelated.” Just as in face-to-face meetings, first impressions count. As much as possible, remote workers should make the effort to make their initial messages positive. You can do this is through expressing encouragement and motivation.

A study published by the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) demonstrated that high trust teams were expressive about their enthusiasm for the project and gave ample encouragement and compliments to their colleagues. The Organization Science study backs this up. In teams with high initial trust, opening messages saying “I’m excited to work with this team” or “Looking forward to working with you all” were common. Teams with low initial trust lacked this enthusiasm.

High trust teams also gave positive motivation, focusing on what their team could accomplish if they performed well. Low trust teams, on the other hand, focused on what they could lose if they didn’t perform well.

Though first impressions are important, establishing a positive tone mid-project can still improve trust. The study included some teams showing low initial trust, but they moved on to high trust as they expressed more enthusiasm later on.

Task-oriented Communication

Typically, there are three types of communication that take place in virtual teams:

• Social communication. This includes discussions on topics unrelated to the project, such as messages about one’s hobbies, weekend activities and family.
• Procedure-oriented communication. This type of communication is based on setting rules and processes relevant to the task, including discussions on how often to check email, how to monitor work progress, and what the workflow should be like.
• Task-oriented communication. When you share your work with the team, request feedback or directly talk about the task at hand, you are engaging in task-oriented (or task-focused) communication.

In the Organization Science study, social exchanges helped facilitate early trust, but this proved to be insufficient in maintaining trust in the long run. Also, while procedure-oriented communication is important, a team must be able to move beyond it to get things done. Over-discussing work procedures and rules may appear productive, but they can be a way to escape responsibility and waste time while waiting for other people to start the work.

Both studies show that to maintain or create trust, your team must have the ability to move quickly from social and procedural communication to task-oriented communication. Even teams low on initial trust were able to develop more trust this way, and were eventually unaffected by negative feedback and non-contributing members. In high trust teams, communication became exclusively task-oriented and there were rarely any social exchanges. Still, members displayed empathy and support when discussing each other’s work.

Making Communication Predictable

One of the studies also emphasized predictability as an essential aspect of trust-building. Regular, predictable communication was more important than the quantity of communication for maintaining trust. In other words, sending messages often isn’t as important as sending them in a regular schedule or pattern. This means sending daily or weekly reports, acknowledging incoming contributions and informing others of your schedule.

Low trust teams often had unpredictable communication and no forewarning of member absences. High trust teams, on the other hand, informed each other of when they’d be available for work and sent each other prompt messages saying that they received and evaluated a member’s latest contribution. In the JMIS study, high trust teams were also more aware of time zone differences and scheduled their work in such a way that downtime was managed as effectively as possible.

With remote teams, we must know how to communicate effectively if we want to build long-term trust in our working relationships. We can do this by increasing our efforts in expressing our enthusiasm at the start of the project, keeping messages in a positive tone, staying focused on the task, and establishing a regular pattern of communication.

How do you encourage trust in your remote teams? What actions or incidents causes you to trust your colleagues less?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Max Klingensmith

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In a face-to-face working relationship, you may not be particularly conscious of the need to build trust, or the innate tactics you use to do so. But when you’re working remotely, it can be a good idea to give a little thought to trust, and to be conscious of it as you build your remote working experience. Here are what I see as the most effective and most straightforward ways to build trust remotely.

1. Communicate in person.

Don’t leave your communication to email, forums and instant message. Pick up the phone or get on a video chat with your colleagues regularly to develop a sense of presence, rapport and accountability. As humans, we rely a lot on factors like body language, facial expressions and tone of voice to learn about other people.

Making the effort to communicate “in person” — even when you’re located a long way from the office — can do a lot to engender trust with your coworkers.

2. Deliver what you promise.

Yes, we all miss deadlines occasionally, but it’s important to deliver on your promises to your colleagues. I think this is especially important when those promises are yours, rather than deadlines or deliverables that have been set by a group or external party. If you say you’ll do something, do it.

If you say you’ll do something and you fail to deliver, be careful in the way you handle it. Speak to the affected colleagues as soon as you realize you’ll miss the deadline. Explain the situation, answer their questions, and project a new delivery date. Don’t just take full responsibility for your missed deliverable — proactively help your colleagues solve any problems that result from it. This will give them the message that you’re not afraid to accept the consequences of your actions, and that you genuinely care about your coworkers.

3. Be consistent.

Consistency and predictability are crucial to others’ ability to trust you. If you’re inconsistent in the way you work, operate, deal with teammates, or approach your responsibilities, you’re likely to unnerve your colleagues. This discomfort may not be conscious, but it will be there. Think about that boss you had with the wild mood swings — the one whose attitude you could never gauge or anticipate until you were asking them a question. It was difficult to trust that person, right?

Behaving in a way that lets people predict your behavior, work quality, and professional approach will allow them to trust you and encourage them to rely on you — the ultimate compliment in a working relationship.

These are the key factors that I use to build trust in a remote work partnership, and I’ve found it worthwhile to be conscious of them as you deal with colleagues remotely. What tactics do you use to build trust from a distance?

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Fortunately, I have Offline Gmail support enabled, which meant that I could at least continue working on emails received overnight while Gmail was down. But judging by the outpouring of angst on Twitter, many people had a pretty unproductive morning, with some four hours of downtime.

Gmail appears to be back up now, but you can bet that this won’t be the last time a major web app suffers downtime. While we can probably be reasonably confident that Google has the engineering talent to recover from most failures quite quickly (especially as Google’s paid-for Google For Domains users have a service-level agreement, including an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent), we’ve seen many services suffer from a lack of continued support and investment, and some that disappear altogether.

Are we putting too much faith in services that we have no control over? Do you have a backup plan in place in case a critical part of your workflow goes down?

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This is something we have to ask ourselves as web workers.  In fact, our clients are probably asking us this very question through subtext, we just aren’t aware of it.  Important as this question may be, there is another question that should be considered:

Do you appear trustworthy?

Online credibility is especially important for us, since it’s likely that our online presence is the only thing potential customers will see.  In this increasingly searchable world, we need to use every means possible to establish that we are worthy of a client’s trust. Here are some ways in which we can do this:

Make sure your website looks trustworthy. Unfair as it may seem, image matters – especially online.  A few years ago, Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab started The Web Credibility Project.  One of the studies they did was to find out what drove internet users to trust specific websites.  This study resulted in ten guidelines that, when followed, reinforces the credibility of one’s website.  Here are some of the guidelines:

• Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
• Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
• Make it easy to contact you.
• Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

Be consistent in your personal brand. Wherever you go online, as long as you can be found by potential clients, you need to carry a personal brand that reflects the quality of your work.  And that brand has to be consistent.

For example, if you want to be known as the go-to copywriter for Fortune 500 companies, it makes no sense to add slogans against “The Man” and big corporations on your Twitter account (regardless of how fun that might be).  Your clients need the assurance that you are exactly who they think you are.  Any deviation from that leaves room for doubt about your intentions and sincerity.

It also helps to go the extra mile with your personal branding, making your work ethic and values clear to the casual observer.  After all, you can never tell when a future client might get her first impression of you.  It could be via your blog, LinkedIn profile, or a website you created three years ago.

To help with your branding, you can create an online visual identity. You can also maximize your ability to customize your social networking tools.  I recall that Mike Gunderloy recently wrote about customizing your Twitter background to reflect your brand.  It’s a great idea, and I think I’m going to take his lead on this one and try it myself.

Give a timely response to everything. Potential clients and business partners tend to be finicky about communication, especially in the first months of working with you.  They need to know that you are reliable, and that you can respond to their every question as soon as possible.  Why is that?

I think it’s because with every day you spend not replying to an essential question or comment, your client’s trust in you falls a step lower.  The silence gives them the chance to think about certain questions such as “Has this contractor run off with my money?” and “Will she submit the deliverables on time?”  If we do our jobs well, they shouldn’t have to ask these questions.

Be aware of who talks about you online (and what they say). If you haven’t created a Google Alert for your name, whether it’s your own name or your business’ name, now is the time to do it.  If anyone makes unfair and negative comments about your business, you need to set the record straight and put out fires as soon as possible.  Otherwise, you might lose potential leads without your knowledge.

These are only a few things you can do to secure your credibility online, but there are definitely more ways to do it.  Have you tried any of them?  Are there other methods you’ve tried?  How did they work for you?

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It’s an interesting idea, a sort of formalization of the common practice of Googling people. If it becomes popular, the Divvs rating could serve as a quick way to size up potential collaborators and subcontractors. Of course, if it becomes popular, spammers will also try to figure out how to scam it – but we’re a ways off from that point yet. At the moment, it’s at least a fun exercise in comparing your networking level to those of your peers.

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