Remote Employees Need Trust. Here’s How to Build It.

8 Ways to Either Drive or Destroy Your Team’s Performance.

“Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people,” said Stephen Covey. Trust is critical for leadership. You cannot repeatedly break trust with people and expect them to follow you. It just won’t happen.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 has thrust many of us into remote relationships, often without training or preparation. Combine that with the uncertainty surrounding most companies and complicated life at home, developing trust at work becomes both more difficult — and more critical.

A recent HBR study showed that 40% of managers had low self-confidence that they can manage their remote employees. A similar percentage was critical of remote workers’ performance, believing that people are more productive when they’re in the office. Another 58% reported concerns about whether “remote workers can stay motivated in the long-term.”

These negative feelings have an impact on employees. Many of those surveyed felt their manager didn’t trust them in their new remote environment. They cited the need to be always available to prove their dedication, a situation that added to their stress and impacted their performance.

All of this creates a flywheel from hell. Employees don’t feel trusted. Their engagement drops. Management increases the pressure to perform, often through micromanagement. And employees further lose confidence and their performance deteriorates.

Here’s the thing. If you’re a manager, this responsibility is on you. Leadership cannot happen without trust. Employees need to trust you. And you need to trust your employees.

The responsibility is not on others to trust you. The responsibility is on you to earn their trust. And while there’s no magic formula, I’ve found that the following are some of the easiest ways to build — and break — trust with your team.

Make your expectations unquestionably clear.

Whenever I reflect on why someone fell short of my expectations, 90% of the time it’s because I failed to communicate them well. It’s easy to forget that other people don’t live inside our heads. They can’t see our inner thoughts and assumptions. Unless we help clarify those points, the message they hear may or may not be the one we intend.

These miscommunications cause people to waste their time. They build resentment as people struggle to deliver a high quality product. And when people think you’re not taking the time to communicate well, they can interpret it as a lack of respect.

In the absence of face-to-face interactions, effective communication becomes even more important. People are more hesitant to ask for clarification and there’s less opportunity for informal follow-up. My general rule is to over-communicate to the point that people find it annoying. Then I know that I’ve hit the right amount.

Respect people’s boundaries.

It’s tempting to associate remote employees with constant availability. After all, they have the freedom to work at all hours. So there’s no reason you shouldn’t give them a quick call if you need something outside the typical schedule.

Again, it comes down to respect. When you expect people to be available at any time, you tell them that you don’t respect their life outside of work. Since you’re willing to infringe on their life to avoid your own inconvenience, it sends people the message that your convenience is more important than their own.

Make it a conscious effort to respect people’s boundaries. Just because you can contact someone at 9pm, doesn’t mean that you should.

Show an interest in people’s work.

When you’re in a remote environment, you lose the day-to-day visibility. It’s more difficult to see what people are doing, so you ask about their work less frequently. In many cases, managers tend to leave remote workers alone as long as there’s not a problem.

Don’t confuse autonomy with abdication. People want more responsibility and trust. But they also need to see that you care about their work. They want to know that you appreciate the efforts they put in each day.

Focus on checking in with people rather than checking up on them. Checking in with people means seeing how they’re doing and offering your support. Checking up means micromanaging and giving them instructions. One builds trust, the other inhibits it.

And remember that if you don’t tell people you appreciate their work, they’ll likely assume the opposite.

Never misrepresent an employee’s performance, for better or worse.

A core management responsibility is to review and assess employee performance. It’s your job to both hold the standard and give people feedback to help them exceed it. The only way to do this is through objective evaluation and honest reporting.

Misrepresenting someone’s performance helps no one. If you’re overly focusing on the negative, it breeds dissent and an environment of unfairness. People begin to minimize the bad instead of maximizing the good. Soon, you have many people going out of their way to avoid risks and do the bare minimum.

If you’re providing things in too positive of a light, you’re robbing people of their chance to improve. You’ll be holding them to a standard that they’re not meeting, without them even knowing it. They’re trusting you to help them be successful. By holding back that feedback, you’re betraying that trust.

Keep your authority in check.

It can be tempting to show off your intelligence and override an employee’s decision with a (hopefully) better idea. In some cases, it’s unavoidable. But recognize that this always comes with a cost.

In remote environments, it’s easier to make snap decisions and override an employee. We see less of the daily work that led to the current path and are more apt to make a judgment based on limited information.

The moment you make that decision, it’s your decision. It’s no longer the employee’s decision. And the people who now need to execute it will be less committed to the idea. While the quality of the solution may increase, the improvement needs to justify the corresponding reduction in engagement.

If a team is engaged and driven towards developing a solution, they can often make a mediocre idea work. It may take some time, but they’ll improve it on their own. But if the team is disengaged, no idea will be successful.

Remember that once you assign jobs to your people, it’s important to let them do those jobs. Resist the temptation to override your people.

Don’t criticize in public.

There are few better ways to hurt morale than publicly criticizing someone. Not only does it damage trust with the person criticized, you’ll lose respect from the rest of the audience as well.

The only reason to criticize someone is to help him or her improve. And no one’s motivated to improve after getting chewed out in front of their peers, or worse, their own employees.

As people move to more virtual communications, there’s less empathy in our discussions. We’re more comfortable criticizing someone online than we are in person. We’re more comfortable shooting down ideas when we can’t see the face behind them.

Remember that in every conversation, you’re still dealing with a team of people.

Accept full responsibility for problems.

There’s never an acceptable reason to pass blame down to one of your employees. People make mistakes. They’ll let you down. But you’re still the one in charge. And that means that when something goes wrong, it’s on you.

The important thing to remember is that everyone already knows whose fault it is. They all know who made the mistake and they all know it’s your job as the manager to take that responsibility. They’re just waiting to see if you’re going to do it.

Do everything you can to ensure your employees get the salary they deserve.

We work because we’re paid to do it. Salary may not be a great motivator for discretionary effort. But if you stop paying people, they’re going to stop showing up.

More importantly, people tend to view their salary as a proxy for respect. It’s an objective measure they can use to assess how much you appreciate them and their contribution. If you fail to deliver, they’ll either believe that you don’t value them — or you do, and you’re incapable of helping them receive what they deserve. Neither situation’s ideal for trust.

Make Trust a Priority Today

“Earn trust. Earn trust. Earn trust. Then you can worry about the rest.” — Seth Godin

Think about the most toxic workplace environment imaginable. I’ll bet that most of those behaviors involve a lack of trust. When people feel as though they can’t trust their manager, they feel as though they can’t trust their company. And everything about the culture begins to deteriorate.

In remote environments, it’s more difficult to see the immediate consequences of our actions. Without the social cues that let us know whether we’ve said the wrong thing or made a mistake, we lose the chance to quickly correct the problem and recover the trust of our team. All of which degrades the trust within our team and limits your influence as a leader.

The key is to make trust a priority. Not as something that can be gained and held indefinitely, but as something that’s built and reinforced with every action and decision. Regardless of the environment you’re now working in.

And remember that the responsibility is not on others to trust you. The responsibility is on you to earn their trust.