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Going fully remote? Here’s why trust will matter to your success.

The road to fully remote or hybrid work is lined with challenges. Here’s what to address as you begin – and the main thing is trust.

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Minter Dial

Art by

Cami Dobrin

Published on

Oct 24, 2022

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Art by

Cami Dobrin

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going remote

After many learned fast to work from home during the pandemic, organizations now face a more deliberate choice on how to conduct business. How much do we really need to be in the office – if at all?

The quest has provoked high-profile battles between employees and management. Apple employees petitioned to keep their flexible work arrangements.

It may be complex to offer employees the choice to come into the office or work remotely – often called ‘hybrid work’ – tempting businesses to impose a set schedule for all. Big tech companies such as Google and Tesla are driving hard to get their employees in the office more often. Twitter offers full-time remote work if employees want it, but such arrangements are usually limited to techy start-ups.

Why and how might other kinds of businesses go fully remote? At the heart of this question is trust between employees and management. I wrote in my book, You lead: How being yourself makes you a better leader, “Building trust is the critical glue to keep workflow and outputs effective.” The intention to go fully remote must address three elements – in order of importance: Employee engagement, customer benefit and business results.

remote team relationships

Related article

How leaders can level up a remote-working team’s dynamics

Understanding the psychology of group dynamics has much to offer when managing remote-working teams.

  • Leadership
  • min read
    • The proliferation of remote working has brought many benefits, but how should a leader respond if dynamics in a remote-working team are not quite working? Rade Martinovic, Team Facilitator and software engineer at internet of things experts Icentic AG, explains how remote working altered some of his team dynamics: "It takes more effort to keep people engaged. After almost a year working this way, it's gotten better. I less often feel someone has dozed off or isn't paying attention." Considering IT, the distributed workforce needs enhanced support to manage the safety and security of business resources. As employees access IT tools from different networks and sometimes personal devices, and asynchronous communication becomes increasingly important, preserving business communication and ensuring the availability of critical data – like partner contracts, email correspondence, or service level agreements – becomes a top priority. One way to address these challenges and help a remote team flourish might come from an unexpected place: 20th-century Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne, famed for his pioneering transactional analysis theory. Berne also took on how groups work together in his seminal book, The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. Exploring the relationships between an organization's members, known as organization dynamics, many team leaders in tech have found his ideas effective in improving their team's communication, creativity and efficiency. Organizational boundaries: Seeds of team structure The main pillars of organization dynamics are boundaries, defined as limits or edges of ourselves which protect our integrity. These boundaries determine expectations, accountability and responsibility of all parts of the organization, ensuring common standards across the board. In turn, these standards determine workplace communication – crucial for efficient remote work. Berne says three types of boundaries underlie groups: Major internal, minor internal and major external boundaries. At team level, the major internal boundary is between the team leader and team members. The major external boundary separates one team from the company's other teams. Finally, the minor internal boundary separates each team member from their peers. Berne thinks managers can understand relationships that happen at each communication point by examining each boundary. Open or closed boundaries Each boundary is permeable and can be closed or open. A closed boundary is impossible to cross over once the group is formed. Berne gives an example of alumni of a university class. On the other hand, an open boundary is one anyone can cross at any time, for example, in a volunteering organization. What happens at each of these boundaries defines the team culture and shapes the way remote teams work. By understanding these boundaries, team leads can find reasons for poor internal communication, lack of engagement or weak results and solve these problems. What does this look like in real-life teams? Anja Radoičić Vučićević, Serbia-based software engineer and organizational coach, recommends assessing the group's dynamics rather than its structure, then incorporating individual team members' needs into an overall action plan. "We should always first consider whether boundaries are in the right place, whether agreements between all participants are clear and whether everyone in the team respects these agreements. "In any group, including remote teams, the group is not self-sustaining: It doesn't exist without interaction with the external environment. If we consider the pressure from the environment onto the system, the team can address it by opening or closing the boundary. "When the external boundary is open, the team can react quickly to market events or requirements from others, but they're also greatly influenced by external requirements. This can be a prelude to becoming reactive and endangering team identity. "For remote teams, the main source of challenges may lie in addressing the two internal boundaries — major internal and minor internal. For the major internal boundary, consider how team leaders direct employees and how consistent they are in their decisions. On the other hand, team members may pressure team leaders to manage projects one way or another – what we call 'agitation.' Radoičić discusses how leaders can respond to agitation. "When team leaders address agitation by opening the boundary too much, there's too much delegation without the leader participating. This happens, for example, when a leader is disinterested or insecure, not wanting to take responsibility. Team members begin to feel left to fend for themselves. If this boundary is too closed, there's too much control or micromanagement, waiting for approval for minor requests, which leads to a lack of trust and responsibility among employees." Fine-tuning boundaries between team members Radoičić says collaboration and innovation happen around the boundaries between team members. For a team to cooperate effectively on projects, especially when working remotely, these boundaries must have the right amount of flexibility and transparency. "And if this boundary is wide open, there may be too many interdependencies between team members. "If this boundary is closed, team members have independence in their work, but reduced cooperation. Relations are strained and formal, and people don't feel they belong to the same group. They might end up separately building the same solution to the same problem. With remote work, there's greater need to strike a balance and keep everyone in the loop while giving enough flexibility for team members to be productive and engaged." Putting healthy team dynamics into practice Martinović finds when managing engineering teams, team dynamics are crucial for improving productivity. "Teams come to be through interactions between people, communication, responding to events and all the little things. "For established teams like mine, when the pandemic erupted, not much changed. Our team had an advantage because we supported each other, professionally and personally. The team dynamics continued online without much change, and people continued with their work." As a manager, how can you translate theory into practice and establish boundaries in the right place? Radoičić suggests team leaders work with remote employees to identify what restricts boundaries, coming to a mutual understanding of what needs to improve. There's a set of questions to help decipher the team's degree of control and delegation. For control, Radoičić suggests identifying the degree of autonomy team members have in critical and non-critical tasks. Must team members ask for permission to change a process that's not business-critical? Do managers fear delegating tasks? Look at how fit-for-purpose task definitions are, if employees have enough resources to complete tasks independently and if leaders feel insecure or shy away from performing tasks. To understand dynamics between team members, Radoičić recommends finding out how team members see their roles and responsibilities and what they expect of their peers. "While analyzing this internal boundary, it's good to understand whether team members help each other out, share knowledge and ideas, or if they tend to keep information to themselves. If the boundary becomes too wide open, team members end up waiting on each other, which clogs internal workflows and reduces efficiency. So it's crucial to see where each of these boundaries are, then get ideas from the team to set the boundaries right, so they work for everyone." Structuring remote teams in sustainable ways Radoičić believes healthy teams have clear and firmly defined structures and boundaries everyone respects. "Setting boundaries stabilizes processes and makes activities effective. Some people tell me introducing processes withers creativity. But processes are not an end in themselves –  there should be only as many as are needed to make a framework within which people can be creative. "The other extreme, with no processes, leads to chaos where little actual work gets done. We have to establish a framework for work to happen, but leave freedom for ideas to bubble up and be tested." Martinović brings us back to transparency. "I feel fortunate we work in an environment where we're transparent about our work, and the management didn't try to add more means of controlling people, measuring their work or significantly changing our established process." Before boundaries can be set to last, remote teams need to unravel together where these boundaries lie for them. It's in the mutual answering of these questions and frank discussions that remote teams can find a set-up that works long-term.

Remote work upsides and downsides

For some companies or teams, remote work is appealing because it means access to a wider workforce. Going 100 percent remote eliminates all the costs of having a head office.

A Capgemini Research Institute study in 2020 showed remote work may reduce overheads by up to 48 percent.

The remote option may be obvious for tech companies like pure ecommerce businesses or software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, especially if they’re already interacting with all clients digitally. But there will always be industries where fully remote just doesn’t work – even desk-based businesses like legal may need central secure storage for documents.

Even for a techy workforce, fully remote isn’t easy and needs careful consideration. For example, work from anywhere (WFA) is different than work from home (WFH) or work from a specific geographic region. A Flexjobs study showed 95 percent of remote jobs still require a location.

It’s also easy to get lured into remote work because of the savings or because employees want it. Some companies, including Google, Twitter and Facebook, want to pay remote workers less, and some employees are willing to accept lower pay for remote work’s convenience and flexibility. But different pay for remote and in-office workers will introduce a challenging variable in optimizing performance and recognizing contributions. Office-based workers already get greater recognition and credit than those who work from home.

Productivity impacts

A two-year Stanford study on remote work released in 2017 showed a 13 percent productivity gain and reduced turnover in employees working remotely, compared with their in-office counterparts. But the study didn’t consider customer success or long-term employee satisfaction, and over half the remote workers felt isolated and wanted to return to the office at least sometimes.

Productivity gains can also be elusive, depending on existing culture, sector and processes. The report Killing Time at Work ’22 testifies to many companies’ poor practice in trying to make working remotely function well.

Study author Tariq Rauf, CEO of team software provider Qatalog, wrote, “Digital presenteeism is pervasive, with employees working an extra hour each day to show they’re still online and contributing, due to fear colleagues and bosses will think they aren’t working hard enough.”

Who’s going fully remote?

Few well-known companies have opted for fully remote. In Flexjobs’ top 30 companies with the most work-from-anywhere job postings, recognizable names include Wikimedia and Airbnb. Then there are less well-known tech brands like open-source research and development provider Protocol Labs, services like content moderators ModSquad and naturally remote companies like Study.com for online learning.

None are traditional businesses, suggesting legacy companies are staunchly anchored to their offices. So, leaders considering moving their whole organization or a team to fully remote work should consider these elements.

1.  Build trust and improve communication

First, above all else, answer honestly: How much do you trust your team or workforce, and how much do they trust you and other leaders?

Establishing trust and rapport is always important in business, but in remote conditions, you must be more attentive and intentional in fostering and retaining trust.

Communications are particularly important, especially informal exchanges and channels. For example, when will you have a casual check-in to talk about more personal affairs and less official work?

Regardless of the tech infrastructure or software, allow space for conversations without a specific agenda and times for expressions of joy and frustration.

Tyree D. Mitchell, author of Searching for trust in the global economy with Jeanne M. Brett, says, “To unite a team, create a team charter representing how the team works as partners. Explain your objective, role and how people should communicate and be accountable.” He also suggests taking into account cultural norms and differences around building trust when dealing with an international team.

2.  Make your intentions clear

If going 100 percent remote is a radical departure from the past, be honest about the company’s intention. Will it help achieve strategic goals? How does it relate to the company’s overall purpose? Does it help your environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals? If your motivation is largely cutting cost through less or no office space, or improving efficiencies and productivity (for example, by eliminating commuting,) double-down on employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

There are many reasons offices appeal to some people, like teamwork, socializing and status. Being transparent and including your team in your decision-making process will help the transformation succeed.

Your action plan

In constructing your action plan to go fully remote, there are five key considerations. First, take an honest look at your existing culture – how you communicate and behave, workflows and levels of trust. What should you keep and what needs changing? Second, involve your team in your decision-making around the transition. Third, consider carefully how to best serve your customers, including how to gain and onboard new ones. Fourth, embrace the messiness! Ensure constant feedback and stay flexible to work through challenges.

Finally, ensure you have the right technologies to facilitate workflows and teamwork needed for customer success. Prioritise cybersecurity when choosing your tech and give your staff regular training in how to keep your business cyber safe.

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About authors

Minter Dial

Minter Dial is a professional speaker and consultant specializing in leadership, branding and transformation. He has written three award-winning business books.

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