A question was asked near the end of a recent town hall in Ann Arbor by a coworker connected via WebEx chat (visible on the big screens). The question was, “What behaviors cultivate trust when working at a distance?” It almost didn’t get answered but there were no more questions in the room so they turned to remote attendees.
There were minutes left of the scheduled meeting and the smell of pizza filled the air when the question was read. Out CTO offered an answer by alluding to earlier messages on communication, transparency, accessibility, and it being okay (and important) to make mistakes as part of learning and growth. And while everything she said was true, I desperately wanted to say more.
The matter of developing trust while working at a distance is a subject of strong personal and professional interest. Our ability to collaborate and interact in healthy and productive ways is directly related to how comfortable and familiar we are with each other. Trust is the currency of influence. When I need guidance or help, I go to someone I trust.
After the town hall I approached the CTO to talk about this question and the importance of cultivating trust and working across boundaries such as distance or culture. I told her how passionate I was about the subject and would like to do more. She was curious and reached out to me later. We had a great conversation. She suggested I share some of it via a blog post in hopes of promoting broader discussion on the topic. And here we are.
It was in graduate school at the University of Michigan School of Information studying Human-Computer Interaction from 2006-2010 that I was first exposed to formal research and studies on developing trust at a distance. Big corporations were funding studies to understand the behaviors of their workforce through anthropological like research involving cross disciplines like psychology and sociology. There was, and is, a need to understand how technology can improve or enhance how people work together and ways in which it can work against us when culture and personality are critical factors.
Imagine electric typewriters were an amazing new technology to you and suddenly the person typing next to you could type on the same piece of paper you are typing upon with your large incredibly loud electric typewriter. It would change things. You could have a conversation, create a living letter. Imagine you knew what it was like before telephones. Studies were done to understand key factors influencing trust when people interacted using technologies like chat, texting, phone, conferencing, video conferencing, etc.
Back to the question asked in the town hall; what behaviors influence trust when working at a distance? Our CTO referenced things like communication and transparency as being important to developing trust. Looking more closely at the nuances of communication revealed in some of these studies include things like time to reply to email versus chat, punctuation and spelling, formal/informal tone (and what makes it so), and how we perceive and trust others when audio or video were poor quality or unavailable. Or the importance of having a face paired with a voice when meeting someone virtually for the first time.
With so many of us are interacting via technology on a regular basis, the importance of recognizing, studying, and sharing information on behaviors which cultivate trust is more critical than it has ever been. As an architect I’m fascinated not only with how we engineer our products and deliver them, I’m equally interested in how we engineer our interactions with each other, how we collaborate, influence, and are influenced toward our shared goals. I hope this blog post is the start of a broader conversation on developing trust when working at a distance.