I had a great conversation with a team of experts about building and increasing trust in your virtual team. Here is the webinar replay if you missed it (click play on the YouTube video below to watch it).
I highly recommend you watch it, especially if you work as part of a virtual team or manage a remote workforce.
Dr. Howard B. Esbin of PlayPrelude, and Lisette Sutherland, of Collaboration Superpowers hosted the webinar on Google Hangouts.
The panel also included Alexey Pikulev, Jean-Francois Stich, and Suzanne Malek who are experts in the areas of virtual team management.
Note: The video transcript is below.
Cheers!
Hassan
P.S. – A lot of people asked me where I got the green screen that appears behind me in the video. I bought it from Amazon here.
P.P.S. – Here’s the link to the video again:
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Lisette: And we’re live, great. Welcome everybody to this Hangout on Air. My name is Lisette. And today I’m super excited because we’ve brought together a cross section of interesting people from all over the world – where we’re represented from Vancouver to Russia today, and from people in the consulting field and the corporate field and in the academic field. And we’re here to talk about trust and specifically building trust on remote teams. So as an introduction, what I’d like to do is ask everybody a question. And we’ll start with Hassan. And the question is what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word trust? It could be an image, situation, anything. But what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Hassan: Hello, Lisette, and thank you so much for hosting this. So if I were to think about one word, that would be confusion. Whenever someone tells me what does trust mean, have no idea on that.
Lisette: Great. Howard, how about you?
Howard: The first word that comes to mind is actually trees. And I don’t mean to be cryptic, but doing some research on trust, in old English, the word trust actually comes from the word tree because people used to make a vow together by holding their hands to the trunk of the tree. So the word tree and trust are related. And because I’ve been doing that research, that’s what comes to mind when I think of trust – trees.
Lisette: Interesting. Mine will go along with yours. I’ll tell it at the end. Jeff, how about you? What do you think of?
Jeff: My word would be a bit more negative because I’m thinking of vulnerability. When I trust someone, I become vulnerable to this person as well.
Lisette: Very interesting. Very interesting. Alexey, how about you? What do you think about?
Alexey: I think it’s difficult sense and always try to measure trust. But I think it’s impossible to measure trust. We can measure a lot. I don’t know. Or we can measure our emotion I don’t know. And we always try to measure our trust and [team – 00:02:34] measuring. I think it’s impossible. I think it’s a very difficult word for me.
Lisette: You’re not alone. That’s why we’re here. It is a really messy, meaty subject. Suzanne, how about you?
Suzanne: The first word that came to my mind was fragility. I believe that trust is very fragile. I’m thinking is trust really a static condition? Do we reach a state of trust? Or is it evolving? Is it more of a process? But in no way, shape, or form do I consider trust to be a stalwart, very stable situation.
Lisette: I really like that. And the thing that came to my mind, oddly enough, but maybe I don’t feel so odd anymore after Howard’s answer, which is the beach. When I think of trust, for some reason, I think of the beach because I think with especially being steeped in the remote working field, I feel like if I’m trusted to get my work done, I can do it anywhere I want. And for some reason… And I never go to the beach, so I don’t know why the beach came to mind, but there it is. So it’s interesting. So I’ve got confusion, trees, vulnerability, impossible to measure, fragility and stability, and the beach. So we can see that there is a lot to trust when we talk about it. So let’s dive in. And I want to start with the question of first… I always like to start with why it seems to be all the rage these days with Simon Sinek, Starting with Why. But I do like to start with why. Why trust is important at work? Especially, I want to keep this in the professional context of trust at work. And then we’ll get into the remote trust at work. But I just want to start out and get us all on the same page about why it’s important. And Hassan, we want to always start with, oh, Howard, you’re volunteering, great.
Howard: No, I wasn’t volunteering. Perhaps, I’m anticipating what you’re going to say. But maybe, when each person responds to the question, they could talk a little bit about themselves and what they do as well.
Lisette: Indeed, yeah, it’s true. I should’ve introduced what sector people work from. But I think people can do that when they’re talking because we’ve got really a wide variety of sectors here – from the corporate to the academic to the consulting, so it’s an interesting intersection. So okay, Hassan, I guess we will start with you. But you’re kind of an expert on this with your book Influencing Virtual Teams. So why is trust important?
Hassan: [inaudible – 00:05:17]. Lisette, you’re breaking up there a little bit. I’m not sure if it’s [inaudible] and give a quick introduction about me based on what Howard suggested. I’m a Senior Program Manager at Cisco Systems. I work with remote teams on a day-to-day basis across the world. And I am a blogger. I blog about managing work from home and virtual teams, as well as the author of Influencing Virtual Teams. The book is on Amazon. So to answer your question, Lisette, about why is trust important, it’s really simple. The fact is that creating a high degree of trust in a virtual environment is absolutely vital for the success of a team because study after study have shown that individuals who trust each other produce more. They’re more effective. They work more efficiently together. So there are a lot of positive impacts obviously of trust on a team. But more importantly, a low degree of trust actually results in a lack of commitment and some issues with team performance and overall, just a negative energy. I think it’s not just that trust is important, but it’s also the lack of it that affects the team negatively.
Lisette: I think that’s a really good point. Does anybody else want to add to this?
Jeff: I completely agree with Hassan because I think what changed a bit from the last years as well is corporation because trust is absolutely vital, as you say, because we are in this situation in which corporation is essential as well. If everyone was working alone, not in teams, in this sort of situation, it would be a bit less vital. In today’s world, I think corporation makes trust extremely important.
Alexey: I agree with Hassan too because I’m an Agile coach and I’m working with different teams and different companies. I feel that it’s necessary to build some trust, some bridge between different teams, different departments, different units. And it’s very essential thing, I think. But again, it’s difficult to build. It’s difficult to improve. It’s very easy to destroy trust.
Lisette: That is the weird thing, isn’t it? It’s quite one-sided in that way. It’s really difficult to build, and you can destroy it within a minute.
Alexey: Exactly.
Lisette: Suzanne, you were going to say something.
Suzanne: I was. Thank you, Lisette. Building actually on what Hassan had stated, I’ve been doing some research. I guess I should introduce myself. I’m an Adjunct Associate Professor in both online and on-campus venues. I teach various subjects such as statistics, marketing, international business, e-commerce, and IT. I work for several different universities. I did have a chance to teach in the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia in Business Economics in the past. And I’m also a Project Management Professional (PMP). My background includes working for profit and non-profit sectors. And I’ve worked for Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and Coca-Cola USA, for instance. I have an MBA from Portland State University and a B.S. in Management and Marketing from Indiana University. And I’m currently in the dissertation phase in Capella University. And my focus for my research is in collaborative advantage, and specifically the role of trust in collaborative advantage in a virtual environment. All the things that we’re discussing today are very pertinent and interesting to me. I’ve done quite a bit of research in the last couple of years on looking at trust. And I have found studies after studies, as Hassan has said, on the fact that a good level of trust is absolutely important for productivity – whether that’s in a virtual environment or in a face-to-face environment. Without trust, there’s very poor effectiveness in the workplace. And trust and productivity lead to effective collaboration, as collaboration will really create value beyond traditional teamwork. So to summarize, an effective level of trust is a foundation for collaboration and very important in the workplace.
Alexey: Exactly, I agree.
Lisette: You nailed it, Suzanne. I think it sounded perfect. So then let’s move on to what is trust made of. And Hassan, we can start with your favorite equation. I want to talk about the building blocks of trust. And I have my own building blocks. But I just love Hassan’s definition in his book, which is trust equals reliability plus likeability. Hassan, if maybe you want to expand a little bit more. I don’t want to take your thunder. I’m sorry. But I just love… I use your equation in every interview I get, and I just love it.
Hassan: Thank you. Let me start by saying trust is a very nebulous concept. I think everyone here agrees that it’s not like an on-off switch where you can either have trust or not have trust in a team. It more of like a spectrum where you either have low degrees of trust, all the way up to very high degrees of trust. So this makes it very hard to define, very hard to manage. So I always like to break things down and try to oversimplify them, even though it is not a very simple concept. But going back to that definition, which is trust is equal to reliability plus likeability, what that means is that if you want to increase trust, you have to increase the level of reliability, or the level of likeability, or both, so that you can have that final objective. So if you want to talk a little bit about what reliability is and likeability is, reliability is basically the ability of a team member [inaudible – 00:11:39] someone’s ability and integrity. And there are ways in which you can increase that. And with likeability, the definition is more about the affect of trust component. That’s what psychologists call when they want to look at or study the likeability factors. And it’s really just a simple question where do I like the person enough to trust that they do the job. Research shows that if you like someone – whether you’re in a sales setting, for example – you’re more likely to trust them and buy from them. Similarly, in teams, that also affects it a lot. If you like someone a little bit more, you are more productive in terms of team output than if you didn’t or you disliked them.
Lisette: Indeed. Now Alexey, I know that you teach a building trust workshop that includes a trust canvas. Is that right?
Alexey: Yeah, exactly. I am trying to collect some source, some things which can improve our trust. Not our trust, I think it’s more appropriate to say a team trust because from team to team, there’s a little bit of difference. I’m trying to collect different aspects, different factors. And I thought about how to build some very interesting instrument to improve trust, to build some conversation around trust. And I decided to collect different things, different source, and prepare some canvas for the team and try to help them build some discussion around trust because sometimes it’s very difficult to begin some conversation around different things around trust. And what I got… a lot of teams, where we try to apply this instrument, they say that it was very simple. It was very simple to try to start a conversation.
Lisette: Right, you’re helping them visualize it with this canvas, it sounds like.
Alexey: Yeah, exactly.
Howard: I wanted to say that I had an opportunity. You posted that canvas, Alexey, on LinkedIn, and I had a chance to download it and really study it. And I can see why a participant in your workshop, in your consulting, would find it very helpful. I thought it was a very brilliant design in its simplicity. And I really have to compliment you for its creation.
Lisette: So I’ll post. When I post this video later, I’ll post links to everybody’s profile so that people can get in touch. So if you want to get in touch with Hassan to buy his book Influencing Virtual Teams, or with Alexey for his trust canvas, or Suzanne, for your research. I know that you’ve got some research, or Jean-Francois, we’ll have that all on the comments. But Suzanne or Jean-Francois, do you guys want to talk about some of the components? What’s happening in the academic world? We can start with Suzanne if we want.
Suzanne: I’m not clear exactly what you mean by what’s happening in the academic world, as far as research or as far as experiences within the classroom?
Lisette: My thought was around the research, but if there’s something happening in the classroom, that’s I know nothing about, so bring it on.
Suzanne: Okay. Specifically, with the research that I have been doing, I have been able to really dig into the current research that is out there as far as doing literature review on trust. I think that to begin with, I’m actually interested in trust more specifically in an online or virtual environment. And I wanted to say that I think virtual teams nowadays in our current environment are ubiquitous. It’s difficult to think of any corporation that doesn’t have some virtual component. But there’s a lot of research on management, organizational perspectives, technology on virtual teams, collaborative orientation, and trust in general regarding relationships, communication, productivity, and processes. But in the academic world, with regard to literature review, we still see a very healthy gap where we are looking at trust development in terms of virtual teams, and the influence that trust has on the achievement of collaborative advantage in virtual teams. Hassan had mentioned something a few minutes ago. And I don’t think you used this term, Hassan, but I think that you are looking at an aspect that I’m exploring as well, and that is that effective trust can influence collaborative advantage in a positive way, obviously, to achieve that advantage. But ineffective trust in relationships or the inability to build healthy trust can actually cause a type of collaborative inertia to become present. And so those are very interesting ideas, and again, more of a focal point on why we look at trust and really consider that it is a premier concept in examining communication and virtual team.
Howard: I’d really be interested in Jeff’s take, given that I was asking earlier before the session started. If I understand correctly, Jeff, you had worked or have some involvement in the game sector in the corporate world, and then went back to university. If you could speak to your background a little bit, then your own… I know that you’re not directly looking at trust. But if you could talk about your own research, that would be really interesting, I think, in this context.
Jeff: Yeah. Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself earlier. My name is Jean-Francois or Jeff, and I’m a Ph.D. student in Management at Lancaster University. I’ve been working before in the video game industry, working on online communities within video games and how they interact with one another. That got me interested in virtual interactions. And now my Ph.D. is about the impact of virtual interactions on well-being and stress at work. And I’ve done some research as well on trust. Maybe I could share a bit later on.
But just something I would like to add to this very interesting conversation, I think the one keyword for me is perception because Alexey, you were saying earlier that it’s very difficult to measure trust. And obviously, trust or trustworthiness is not like a personality trait or something because this way, it would be easier. We’ll do a personality scale and measure trustworthiness. But when we look at trust and when we measure trust, we’re actually interrogating others, if others believe you to be trustworthy. I think that’s important to say that it’s about perception, perception of ability, perception of integrity, how others perceive you. And I think when we go later on in discussing the specificities of virtual teams, I think this perceptions aspect might get more important because we might be less able in some aspects of perceiving trustworthiness among other persons in this kind of online environments.
Lisette: Maybe we should jump into that. Let’s maybe discuss. I’m jumping the gun a little bit. But we can come back to some of the other things, but let’s discuss the difference between trust online versus trust in person, or if there are any differences. One thing that comes to mind… I was speaking with Luke Hohmann, the CEO of Conteneo. They do collaborative games, online and offline. And he was saying that there are different kinds of things that happen, for instance, when we are doing something on a whiteboard in person, like a sticky note board in person versus online. So if you’re there in person, what tends to happen is you tend to think in top first and then swarm the board later, and put your sticky notes on the board. But when you’re online, you tend to swarm the board first and then take a step back and talk about it because of your proximity to the board. So there are very subtle differences in the way that we behave online versus offline. And I was wondering if anybody could speak to the differences in terms of how we build trust online versus offline. And I don’t really know where to start that conversation.
Howard: I’d like to jump in. Just because the work that I do, our enterprises developed, as the panel knows, a game called Prelude. The virtual version of the game, which we’re working with right now, stems from a blended learning version. So we’ve had five years of working with this game, which has been called a trust accelerator, in traditional workshops face-to-face. And the essential experience process in the game is where people co-create visual artifacts together. And we all know the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, there’s a lot of truth in that. An image can convey a lot more complexity than words alone, especially in terms of emotion. So we’ve had a lot of experience watching how people… And it’s exactly what Luke was talking about, where there’s a very different process, even though it’s ultimately the co-creation of an artifact, how that unfolds in a co-located face-to-face physical environment – as opposed to happening in a virtual environment. And the one distinct difference that we’ve noted over the last year or so is that in the latter, in the virtual context, the image-making process, that co-creation process is even more critical because of the fact that there are so few physical cues that people can connect to. So if we’re working on a whiteboard together in a physical co-located space, I can see your body language. I can see a lot of things that are very subtle that I might not even consciously be aware of but that I’m processing subliminally that give me a fuller picture of what’s actually being conveyed. When that same experience is happening online, then the actual artifact, the image itself becomes that much more critical to my understanding of that other person. And again, the image will speak volumes, whereas we’re just talking. We’re not going to get the nuances that the image will present. So to summarize, I’ve used the analogy that working and creating trust in a traditional team setting is difficult to begin with, but it’s even more difficult in a virtual context because you have less groundedness and less visual cues and subliminal cues that can orientate you to what’s really happening. So it’s a very subtle, complex, and challenging process. Coming back to your other point about academics, it’s very interesting in my research to watch how many universities and colleges around the world are now building in virtual team courses on leadership, on management, how to communicate virtually. So we see this growing, emerging response to the challenges that are already in the market in the corporate sector – where we’re doing it but we may not be really good at what we’re doing and have little choice about not doing it, if that makes sense.
Lisette: What I like about your game, Howard, is how you’re creating this physical artifact, and it very much reminds me of your trust canvas, Alexey, because you also then have a physical artifact that the team has after an exercise – which it seems like virtually, it’d be more important than in person.
Alexey: Yes. Actually, during the last year, I tried to gather different facts from different cultures, different countries, which factors will be important to improve our trust, to build our trust. And what I got was very interesting because for most people, for most countries, I got the same factors. I got very similar factors. And if we have very similar factors which can improve our trust, why we can build our virtual team. I think it’s very easy to build a virtual trust, to improve our virtual trust throughout all cultures, throughout continents, because we have very similar factors which are really important for us. And again, of course, we still think that when we try face-to-face collaboration, we will get a lot of trust, a lot of things. But I think it’s our mistake because it’s necessary to improve our process. It’s necessary to improve our approaches to build and improve trust. It’s all about trust. It’s not about trust in themselves.
Lisette: I really find that it’s interesting that you’ve got… because I know you do workshops all over the world. I see you going everywhere. So it’s interesting to me that these building blocks of trust are so universal. I find that extremely interesting. And maybe there’s some academic research to back it up, Suzanne or Jean-Francois.
Jeff: I’ve got this study in mind. Just going back to what Howard said about visual cues, there was a concept very popular since the 70s in communication research called media richness about the amount of visual cues you can transmit with media. And I’ve got this experiment in mind conducted by Northeastern University, MIT, and Cornell in which they compared different groups in a trust simulation game. For some participants, they get to know each other face-to-face for 30 minutes; for some others, it was instant messaging. And what they found is that they weren’t more selfish or less trustworthy. The face-to-face participants were more able to perceive trustworthiness among other participants. Then they pushed the experiment a bit forward by actually putting participants in pairs with a robot. They took a more complex robot in which they could manipulate the body language or the eyes or the jaws or this kind of facial expressions as well. And for some participants, they gave the robots crossing arms or leaning away or touching his ear like this. And for some others, they gave signs of trustworthiness. And they found that participants were more prone to trust the robots showing these negatives signs. So I felt this was very interesting because even an inanimate object like a robot, which is not capable of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness, just by manipulating the body language or the visual cues, they were able to influence the perceptions of trustworthiness among the different participants.
Lisette: Wow!
Suzanne: Lisette, I have a study in mind that was actually based on some research done by Lynne Zucker. And to me, it was very interesting because it talked about three different sources of trust. So there’s a process-based trust, and that’s based on your concrete experience. Maybe you have had a relationship with other team members and you have that experience in mind, firsthand or even third-party experience. That’s a process-based. And then a characteristic-based that’s independent of concrete exchange, and it’s more a personal characteristic such as by age, sex, or particular ethnic communities. And then there’s institutional-based trust. This is an interesting aspect in that the trust is based on how we perceive and what we think about a network of relationships, such as professions, certifications, brand names, memberships in associations, traditions, things like that. So it just shows how complex this whole aspect of trust is. And I would think that based on where most of your impressions are coming from, that those would be in a sort of a hierarchy as to how you go into with your attitude and your expectations in working with certain members on a team.
Lisette: Wow! You’re right. When we look at it like this… I was hoping we would narrow it down somehow so that this wouldn’t be such a… But I think we’re expanding things, or it’s just how it goes. But Hassan, I know you work with virtual teams all over the world at Cisco. Your teams are everywhere. So what are you finding in terms of building these relationships online? What are the differences?
Hassan: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I just find, by the way, this conversation fascinating. So it’s great to hear what Alexey, Jeff, Susanne, Howard, and you, Lisette, are doing in this space because this is just eye-opening and verifying a lot of the stuff that I’m working with. So going back to your original question, Lisette, I think trust, as a definition, what it means and how it applies, I think that’s pretty much stable whether it’s in a virtual environment or a co-located physical environment. I think that definition doesn’t change. Of course, it is nebulous. It’s confusing. There are a lot of definitions that could go all over the place. But at the end of the day, I think trust is trust. And the fact that Alexey mentions looking across different cultures, it’s sort of the same mode that applies there. That’s really interesting because at the end of the day, I always say that we are social creatures. We need to connect with other human beings. And if you look at the entire history of human race, our default mode is that we build groups of people that need to interact to accomplish certain goals – whether you want to live, co-locate, that sort of thing. And so our primal instinct is by default always the face-to-face, needing to touch, to see, look at the body language [inaudible – 00:32:48] obviously. I think everyone agrees that trust is more challenging than it is in face-to-face interactions. But what we’re trying to do – and what Howard is doing with the Prelude, and Alexey, I haven’t seen your matrix there and framework, but I’d be very interested in it – is to try to move as close as we can given that constraint of no face-to-face interaction. And what’s the best way to do it? And I think over the last few years, this has helped a lot, whether it’s using and leveraging those amazing tools like Prelude and frameworks to help establish that, or even try to mimic what we do offline. For example, one thing that’s really missing in at least my job with virtual teams is what we call the water cooler effect, that whenever you’re in a corporate setting, with your co-workers, you meet in the water cooler or the small cafeteria. And you talk about things unrelated to work. You talk about life and hobbies and vacations and that sort of thing. In virtual teams, it’s a lot more transactional where if I’m working on a specific task and I have a meeting with you, it’s usually cut and dry. Let’s talk about this. Let’s end the meeting and move on. But when you start introducing social team experiments and that sort of thing and try to add informal discussions and games, that helps a lot in building that sort of trust base within your team.
Lisette: I also think about the video component. Whenever we can use video, using video is so crucial because it gives us one extra sense that we’ve lost. When we’re virtual, we don’t really have a lot. You can’t smell them, which is probably good. And we can’t touch them. We can’t overhear things. So having sight ends up being a crucial component. And I don’t know, Hassan, if you’ve seen that on teams that people who use video or people who don’t.
Hassan: Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing that up. In my world, this is so obvious that I can sometimes overlook it. But it’s not [inaudible – 00:35:09] millions of dollars actually have for executives dedicated rooms that you sit down and you actually see life-sized people sitting in a conference room called telepresence solutions that basically increase that level of intimacy. And it’s not cheap solutions. I know we can easily use Skype or Google Hangouts for free, yet companies seeing the value of video collaboration and videoconferencing invest millions of dollars in those high-throughput high-bandwidth, very high-definition videos to pick up on those little subtleties of facial expressions and body language and that sort of thing. So yes, absolutely, videoconferencing is the second best thing to face-to-face interaction.
Lisette: Yeah, and it’s one of the things that I teach in my workshops, which is if you can get the best equipment possible. And Google Hangouts is fine for conversations like this. But I know we always have technical difficulties on Google Hangouts. And it does make the conversation that much harder. Had I known the technical difficulties, I probably would’ve chosen another tool for tonight. But I like the lower third banner so much. I just wanted to use it. But you’re right. Getting that good equipment though so that we get as high bandwidth communication as we can. I think that that really ends up being crucial. But what else?
Jeff: I think I would add some nuance to this because I think it’s also about choosing the right medium for the right circumstances as well because there could be advantages of using a less rich media like email or instant messaging in situation in which you might not want to show yourself or a situation in which it might be a bit tense to put the video as well because something that I have found as well is that sometimes when there are less cues or there might be similarities that are enhanced by this. Suzanne before was talking about group membership or trust in a group as a whole. And I think this can be improved as well. In some circumstances, if you have only a text messages situation in which you cannot see that the other is physically different than you or culturally different than you as well there. Some similarities can emerge as well. Or just to take a very random example, if you look at my face, I’ve got a goatee, a downward facing beard. And this has been associated with villains, characters in movies that are plotting evil, Disney characters, yeah. Just in terms of physical appearance or faces, this kind of things, maybe I would have more advantages of communicating by emails to avoid this sort of distortions.
Suzanne: Yes Jeff. I’d like to add something just quickly, and that is that I do a lot of online teaching. And when I grade papers, I really have no additional information about the student other than what they have produced. So I feel as though I am more effective in my grading processes because I don’t have prejudices that may enter in when I’m in an on-campus classroom. The personality of the student may in some way influence me. And I’m being very honest here. I work against that. But it is a factor. And I am particularly interested in seeing what types of communications and what types of technology can enhance our ability to communicate. But I think, Jeff, that was a very important point, that sometimes it is a distractor.
Howard: Yeah, I want to add to that. Last fall, we did a pilot of Prelude with a colleague and a large corporation based in Germany. And for the workshop component where we were actually explaining the process of the game to the team involved, the union… workers’ counts, not necessarily union, of that company had a strict policy for no video of staff because the policy was based on a fear of invasion of privacy. Even though it was a work setting and people were dealing with a work situation, the perception of this particular work counts…this is a huge multibillion dollar company. The perception was it’s too much information. So we worked around it.
Similarly, I read a study from a few years ago. And my doctoral research, before I got involved with the game and my enterprise, was in cross-cultural communication. This study that I read talks about the fact that in the west, there’s a value when we look at somebody in their eye, we’re making eye contact. And that’s seen as an indicator of being honest and transparent and forthcoming. But there are certain cultures where making eye contact is really not the norm and it’s perceived as being rude and invasive and forward. So if video becomes the means to bring us together, obviously, there will be certain settings where that may be misinterpreted. Body language and eye contact might be misinterpreted. If there isn’t enough cultural sensitivity to cultural difference that’s built into the process, and I think that’s another dynamic or another facet of how one consciously works towards building trust virtually, cross-culturally, by being sensitized to these differences.
Lisette: I’ve also heard this in an interview. I think it was also with Luke Hohmann. He said that often, asynchronous chat can be very good because if you don’t speak the language, for example, the chat… Or if your language of the group is not the predominant language of the group, then chat can help as it gives you another way of expressing yourself. And living in the Netherlands and not speaking Dutch well enough, I know that sometimes when things are being written in Dutch, it gives me a chance to process it a little bit. And I can’t read it so fast. So it gives me the extra time that I need. So yeah, you’re right. I can see that there are some other reasons for not using video. But another question that comes out of this is what else can we do online besides using video or some of these other things that we’ve done. What are the other things we can do to build trust in online relationships?
Howard: Because we’ve had dialog and I have had dialogs with all of you by degree over the last few months and we’re building up, amassing a schema… And I would say it goes back to something that Hassan was speaking earlier about the water cooler phenomenon. And you’re seeing in tweets and on LinkedIn, more and more of an awareness that particularly of working organizational virtual teaming, management has a responsibility to create extra time. As I’m saying, the dialogs are generally functional. You’re getting together. You have a task to deal with. Let’s deal with the task and you get on, and you get off – whereas if you were in an office in a co-located environment, you might find yourself having a coffee after the meeting. So by building in more space and legitimizing, I think the opportunity to find out more about the other person in a holistic way can go a long way to helping bridge the gap, and that doesn’t require sophisticated technology. That could be even an audio dialog. It doesn’t necessarily need video or chat. But just to give people an opportunity to learn about each other in a legitimate way, so that the time-money formula is made a little more elastic.
Hassan: Yeah, and I wanted to add one thing here based on this great discussion. Earlier, I know Jeff and Suzanne touched upon the fact that in certain situations, it might not make sense, or there’s some disadvantage for using video. And Howard, your point about the cultural sensitivity, that’s eye-opening. I would argue that in managing virtual teams and communicating, in general, if we want to apply it at least in the U.S. culture, for example, or at least Canada and the U.K., I would say that just from a building trust perspective – not from a more effective communication perspective, which is a separate topic – there is what I call the pyramid of communication where the higher up in the pyramid, the more intimate and more cohesive you are as a team, with high-end, high-definition [inaudible – 00:45:14] just audio only, like a phone or [inaudible]. And then finally, it’s email where it’s dry and you send an email and then two days later, someone reads it and responds. And the higher up in the pyramid you are, the more intimate you are and the more trust you build. Now in certain situations, you don’t want that. In Suzanne’s perspective, if she’s inspecting papers for students, you don’t want that level of intimacy or trust because it’s really a transactional sort of relationship there where you want to give a grade for someone who you don’t want to be biased for or against with. But going back to the idea of how do we increase trust within that sort of pyramid, one idea is to move up the layers. So if you are used to working with people through email all the time, then taking it up a notch or two with either picking up the phone and talking to them a little bit more often so that you hear their voice, their variations and tone and so on and so forth could help that a little bit. And then most importantly, it’s actually touching multiple levels on the pyramid. I’m sure this panel has interacted in the past in several modes. So right now we’re using video. I have had email exchanges with a couple of you in the past. I have also just picked up the phone and talked on the phone with audio. So with multiple touch points with your teams, if you use the mixed media of email, instant messaging, audio only, audio-conferencing, and video, that also helps with that mix of building that trust in multiple angles from a virtual team perspective.
Lisette: Love it. Anybody else want to jump in with research that they’ve found?
Suzanne: I would like to add something, Lisette, and that is that the research that I’ve been doing is focusing on three key aspects of building trust. First of all, I’m using the model that shows that trust building is really a cyclical process, not a linear process as we might assume. If we start out small as a team, for instance, and work towards small, incremental gains, that’s a very effective way of building trust. And those positive outcomes form the basis for trust development for consecutive positive outcomes that further enhance the level of trust. And I think that’s something that we can keep in mind regardless of the media, regardless of the venues, regardless of the relationships that may exist because this might be a pattern to be able to say that we form different expectations about our working in teams – whether online or in person.
Lisette: Wow! I love that. So we’ve got that in order to build trust, we have to touch multiple layers of the pyramid, and it’s a circular process.
Alexey: Exactly.
Howard: And incremental.
Lisette: And incremental. My God! It’s not even just a matrix; it’s a Play Prelude picture.
Howard: [laughs]
Alexey: And I added some factor. I added a consistency. We should measure… We should improve our trust from time to time. We should estimate how we can prove it from time to time. It’s necessary to understand. It’s a process, not just one sense which you can do immediately. It’s definitely important to invest the time and other stuff to improve our trust.
Lisette: Right. So it’s really never ending also. There’s no mountain top of trust where you’ve reached the top and then [inaudible – 00:49:32].
Howard: I think just thinking about popular culture and romance movies where there’s some discord in the relationship, Hassan talked about a very primal dynamic here where trust has to continually be earned. I think Suzanne said it also. It’s not a place that you arrive at and it’s a static condition, one that you’re continually working towards sustaining and growing. And what you said right at the beginning, it could take a lifetime to build that kind of trust. And it can take a moment, ironically, to destroy it – as we see consistently in the media with public figures. And coming back to Suzanne’s notion about institutional trust, it’s very hard to expect people in companies or organizations to be trusting when they may have trust issues with the very company or organization that they’re working with. So it seems to be a multidirectional imperative, if you will, that everybody has to be co-responsible for notwithstanding where they might be in the organization.
Jeff: Yeah, I completely agree with you, Howard. There are different types of trust. There is the trust in the other individual, but the trust as a group as well that is important. And as you say it, the things influence one another as well. So if you perceive the leader of your virtual team to be very trustworthy, then in consequence, you will also believe the other group members to be more trustworthy. So the trust you have in the leader impacts the trust you have in other members as well. Even if you don’t know them personally, there is this sort of trust that is generated just by belonging to the same group or to the same institution.
Lisette: We’re nearing the end. And what I’m taking away from this is that this is really a bigger, meatier, messier mix of components than I even suspected to begin with. We’ve got that it’s multidimensional, that it’s circular, that it’s got different layers and multiple touch points, and that it’s a moving target that can never be reached. I’m throwing in the towel. That’s it. I’m done [laughs].
Hassan: Now you understand why when you ask me how do I sum up trust in one word, I said confusion.
Lisette: Yeah, brilliant. You’re spot on, absolutely. I think we could go on and on and on about this. But what I take away from this is that I feel a personal responsibility to become a more trustworthy person myself because really, you can’t make somebody else trustworthy. You can inspire people through behavior. But I feel now more an urgency to be more reliable and more responsive and more likeable and transparent, all the things that we’ve talked about today that are components of trust. I don’t know whether you guys… If there’s any possible way to summarize this beast, how can we do it? Anyone who want to take a step.
Howard: One quick thing is that in everything I’ve heard, it really comes back and it picks up on what you’ve just said, Lisette, to the individual. And I think that there’s a relationship between trust and sincerity and integrity. So ultimately, I think it comes down to people picking their position, standing the ground that they’re on. And it really comes down to social and emotional intelligence. I need to understand myself. I need to understand others. I need to understand what makes people different. And I need to be able to embrace diversity in order for me to be able to situate myself in the wheel or the circle of life. And I think it sounds maybe airy-fairy, but in daily concourse, the only thing we ultimately have to stand on is our integrity. And people genuinely intuitively feel when somebody is being sincere. And I think that emotion transcends physicality. I think it can be picked up virtually as much as it can be picked up physically. So at the end of the day, I think we have to look to ourselves, as you said, to take a position. And hopefully, other people will respond in kind.
Lisette: Anyone else with closing words? What I’d like to do at the end is I’d like to give everybody a chance to let people know if you want to know more, for instance, about the trust canvas or the book or the research that’s happening or Howard’s game, I’m going to give everybody a chance to do a closing statement on what’s the best way to find you, in terms of if you want the workshops or the books and everything, so we’ll go around. Before we do the closing round, does anybody else want to speak to, maybe try to summarize for yourself what you’ve come away with from this conversation?
Jeff: I could add something. I think it’s very nice that you’re trying to be more trustworthy and taking this resolution. I agree that it’s at the very core to the concept of trust as well. From our discussion, there is an added element of virtual teams as well that you have to take into account. So I found it very nice that you’re working on consulting activities or team-building games for virtual teams as well. I think that’s very key because there is this new context that can be very daunting to apprehend as individuals. So you can be the most trustworthy person in real life, but it can be difficult to translate this trustworthiness in virtual teams as well. So I really like the work that you’re doing in helping people in virtual teams, showing their trustworthiness in the virtual world as well.
Lisette: Yeah, it’s a big deal because we’re seeing how big it is, how trust is in person. And now we have to apply that to a virtual team. You have to apply this big multidimensional beast to virtual. It just seems it’s a lot of work to be done here.
Howard: We’re up for it.
Lisette: Yeah, totally, bring it on. Suzanne or Alexey or Hassan, any last thoughts?
Alexey: Yeah, I agree with Howard that sometimes it’s very difficult to build trust, to improve trust in virtual teams. But I think we discovered it’s very similar. It’s very similar to apply all our source or all our instruments to virtual teams or to co-located teams. I think it will depend on leadership, on contacts, but it’s not impossible. We should do it, I think.
Hassan: Yeah, I agree with that. And just closing thoughts, as virtual team practitioners in one way or another, I really believe that we have no choice. I really think that going forwards, every single industry is going to have a virtual team component for it. And if you don’t figure out the way in which you work together as a team, you are going to be outcompeted as an organization. I think it’s just a simple fact that there are a lot of benefits of remote work, even if it’s not a hundred percent virtual. But just the fact that you can have teams and talent from different countries and different time zones, it’s just the way to go for the future. So I think it does come with challenges. Defining it is not easy, and trust is a big thing – not a recent problem, obviously. But I really think that it’s going to happen and it’s a matter of finding a way for us to be more effective and efficient – as opposed to, hey, it doesn’t work, so let’s not just work with virtual teams anymore because I don’t think that’s a possibility.
Suzanne: And Lisette, one last thought from me is that I want to thank you for organizing this, and everybody for coming here and participating. I think it was such an excellent interchange and exchange, really. Even though we had started out identifying some daunting and complex concepts for discussion, it turned out that we ended up with a lot of agreement and a lot of building on and enhancements to the ideas, so it can be done.
Lisette: Indeed. And everybody needs to find their own channel depending on their situation. So what I like about this is that there’s such a breadth of resources out there that people can use for building trust. So let’s actually go through the ones that are just on this call today. So we’ll have everybody give just a little bit of research about what you’re doing and what’s the best way to find you if people want to get in touch with you. Suzanne, how about we start with you?
Suzanne: Okay, I would just like to provide my email address, and that’s [email protected]. And I believe I already shared the research that I’m doing and some of what I do in my offline work as far as working with different firms and as a project manager. But specifically, I’m very passionate about this research, and I’m hoping to finish my data collection and finish everything before September of this year. So I’m moving on and I would love to hear from individuals any time. Thank you.
Lisette: Okay, great. So for Suzanne and people wanting to get in touch, then email Suzanne. I’ll put your email in the liner notes. Alexey, how about you?
Alexey: I’m trying to develop practical tools for improving trust and other things. You can connect with me by email: [email protected].
Lisette: And maybe, if people would like to take your workshops, it’s a good idea to email because your workshops are all over the world.
Alexey: Yeah, exactly. But because I’m trying to engage people, trying to spread my ideas how to improve trust, it’s very interesting to get a feedback and get some insights from different countries, from different teams, from different people. I think it’s important because it’s practical tools. If we try to build some practical tools, it’s necessary to get a diversity of opinions.
Lisette: Indeed, plus we’re virtual, so we’re global.
Alexey: Yeah, exactly.
Lisette: And Jeff, how about you?
Jeff: Yes, I’ve got different media. You can contact me through email, Twitter, Skype. I all gathered in my website jfstich.com. So you can contact me using whichever media you prefer. And I’m researching anything with respect to the impact of technology on the workers, mostly from a psychological perspective. So if you’ve got any idea of potential collaboration, feel free to contact me and I will be happy to find with you some topic of investigation we can work on together.
Lisette: Great. Hassan, how about you?
Hassan: Thanks, Lisette. And I just want to echo Suzanne’s comment. Thank you so much for moderating today and facilitating. And thank you and Howard for putting this together. This was fantastic, really enjoyed it. As I mentioned earlier, I actually changed my lower half. I love this tool. Thank you, Lisette, for giving me a heads-up on that. I just changed it to show my actual blog, thecouchmanager.com. Everything is there, my contact information as well as my course. [inaudible – 01:02:53] I teach about managing and influencing virtual teams, as well as the book. There’s the book link there to the Amazon page for that topic as well. So you can find me there. Anything you need, feel free to look at the About Me page and contact me through either Twitter or Facebook or just a quick email.
Lisette: And definitely buy the book Influencing Virtual Teams. If you want concrete tips and practices, that’s the place to go. I’ll plug your book there, Hassan, because I loved it.
Hassan: Thank you.
Lisette: And Howard, we’ll end with you. How can we get in touch with you? If we want to play your Play Prelude, your game for virtual teams, how do we do that?
Howard: Just go to playprelude.com and everything you want is there. And we’re just in the process this week launching 2.0. So we’re very excited and we’re working internationally. And we welcome all interest. And I just want to thank everybody on this panel today because it’s been really illuminating and fun, and Lisette in particular for really taking the lead on bringing this all together. It’s been great experience. So I thank everybody.
Lisette: Indeed. Thanks everybody. It’s sort of my greedy pleasure to get you all together. It’s one of my favorite topics. I wanted to pick everybody’s brain and get all the perspectives. We’re running a little bit over time, so I’ll end this quickly. If people want to learn more about building trust on virtual teams, you’ll be able to see this video at collaborationsuperpowers.com. And I’ll put everybody’s links in the liner notes. We’ll sign off here. Thanks everybody.
