Building Trust in a Hybrid World

This article is the first in our Hybrid Working series. Each article explores the inner workings of hybrid work environments, and provides tools to help you navigate the hybrid working world with your colleagues, or employees. Our articles are complemented by the first season of the Making Shift Happen Podcast, launching 4th August 2021, which will be available on your favourite podcast platform.?

“Managers and supervisors must view trust as a foundation for success with hybrid work. When workers feel properly supported working from home, they’ll find it easier to balance things out when working at other times in the office. Both are necessary for hybrid work.” (Unified Communications as a Service [UCaaS] “Flex Study 2021”)

Even before the pandemic forced us into remote and hybrid work, trust was a crucial factor to the success of companies, and successful employee relationships and engagement. If we turn to dictionaries, definitions of trust repeatedly emphasise the notions of safety, honesty, reliability. Stephen Covey, author of The Speed of Trust, finds that trust facilitates good communication, and as such increases productivity, speeds up efficiency, and increases business value. Let’s take a look at what the research has to say about high-trust vs low-trust companies. In “The Neuroscience of Trust,” Paul Zak finds that “compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report:?

106% more energy at work,?

76% more engagement,?

74% less stress,?

50% higher productivity,?

40% less burnout,

29% more satisfaction with their lives,?

13% fewer sick days.”

Zak based his experiments on the levels of oxytocin in the blood of participants. Oxytocin is the trust hormone, that is also released at birth to bond mothers and babies—a strong indicator of increased trust! These impressive numbers illustrate just how crucial trust is in creating a healthy and sustainable company culture.

According to trust scholar Brené Brown, trust can be broken down into seven elements, all encompassed by the acronym BRAVING. BRAVING stands for

Boundaries: know and respect your colleagues’ boundaries, and ask instead of assuming what’s okay and what is not.

Reliability: Be a reliable colleague who is aware of their strengths and limits. Don’t overpromise, and do what you say you’ll do!

Accountability: Create a culture where people own their mistakes, feel safe enough to apologise without feeling threatened, and correct whatever went wrong.

Vault: Don’t share information that is not yours to share. Always respect other people’s privacy! This rings especially true for teams. Vegas rules apply here: what happens in the team, stays in the team!

Integrity: Your best practice should always be what is right, and not what is the most comfortable solution. Integrity often happens just outside your comfort zone.

Nonjudgment: Be open in your communication with others so that everyone involved feels safe and supported enough to speak their mind without fearing judgement by others.?

Generosity: Always assume the best, never the worst!

All these factors are interconnected, and at the heart of their network stands trust as an outcome, which in turn drives innovation, employee satisfaction, and tangible business value.?

But can we measure a “fluffy” feeling like trust? The trust equation helps us understand the different factors that are at play when we trust someone:

?As we can see, being credible, reliable, and having a strong interpersonal connection are crucial when building trust with others. Measured against that, however, is a more selfish aspect of human interaction: self-interest. If someone is perceived as mostly focusing on their goals and gains while being less concerned for others and shared goals, their trust credit ends up in the negative. One way to lower our self-interest scores is outlined in Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He argues that changing our worldview from competition to collaboration creates mutually beneficial win-win situations, instead of the more negative, and more common, win-lose.

However, since the pandemic forced us into remote and hybrid work, it has been harder to build and retain trust among employees, and between employees and their leaders. Now, the key question is: How can we translate the in-person measures to create and retain trust in a hybrid work environment? Here are three ways:

Stay connected.

Staying in touch in a remote and hybrid work environment is especially challenging. By now, we all suffer from “Zoom fatigue,” and are largely fed up with yet another video conference. Yet, it is crucial in a culture of open communication to create small pockets of interaction, so-called water cooler conversations. Water cooler conversations are the ones in hallways, at the printer, or when making coffee. When we’re not able to have these because half of our team isn’t on site or we are working from home, why not turn to more traditional modes of communication? A quick phone call to informally check in with someone doesn’t have to be scheduled, and can have a similar effect as a quick chat when we wait for the office kettle to boil. Don’t forget: your phones still work to make and receive calls, just like they did before Zoom!

Be output-focused.

In a hybrid work environment, it is hard to trace when and for how long everyone works on certain projects, a fact that some leaders may find challenging. Instead of putting too much emphasis on the time worked, we need to change our understanding of success to the outcome of the work, instead of the work itself. It’s all about empowering people to get their work done in a way that suits their personality (compare for example early birds and night owls!). What counts is not the time worked during office hours; rather, the quality of the result on the day of the deadline. As the working world is undergoing the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution, we also have to shift our understanding of quality of output vs time spent in the office working on it! Allowing for autonomy in this way increases our colleagues’ confidence and builds trust.?

Test together.

Let’s be honest: the pandemic and all its challenges is unchartered territory for all of us. The only way we can succeed in this new normal is to work together. Not sure how best to communicate between on-site and remote colleagues? Trying to figure out the best way to share information with your team members? Avail of your colleagues’ experiences and trial new technology together. Taking a leap of faith with new project management tools can thus help to increase productivity and create better outcomes. Test out new tools, and reflect on their helpfulness in your next meeting. Why not play with virtual whiteboards on Miro to increase collaboration in your team, or use PollV during your next virtual meeting to increase team engagement and make sure everyone gets heard? Experimenting like that also helps your colleagues to feel heard and seen, and creates an opportunity for everyone to make visible impact in the way a team works together.

Hybrid working is a new frontier that all of us have to explore and conquer together. Research findings on trust in hybrid work environments are still scarce, so it is on us to trial the most effective techniques that work for us! Overall, creating and retaining a culture of trust in the hybrid working environment is like investing money at the stock market. While there is a certain level of risk involved, like in every other human interaction!, our investments are returned manifold.?

Thank You! Thanks to my Making Shift Happen Colleagues, Anne Mahler PhD, Nichola McConnell & David O' Mahony for their help in creating this article series. Thanks also to you the reader for tuning in.

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