Leadership and People Management: Foundations to Practice · Leading Remote and Hybrid Teams
Building Trust and Collaboration Across Distance
Trust and genuine collaboration do not build the same way across a screen as they do in a shared physical space, which means a leader needs deliberately different tactics rather than simply replicating in-person habits over video.
The informal, spontaneous interactions that naturally build trust and relationship in a shared physical space, a hallway conversation, a shared lunch, do not happen automatically in a remote or hybrid context and need to be deliberately, intentionally recreated rather than assumed to occur organically on their own, since a purely transactional, meeting-only working relationship tends to remain more fragile and harder to navigate through genuine disagreement than one with some real, deliberately built personal connection underneath it.
- Informal interactions that build trust in a shared physical space don't happen automatically remotely and need to be deliberately, intentionally recreated.
- Teams that determine their own collaborative schedule together report considerably higher perceived fairness than when a schedule is imposed by leadership alone.
- A more effective approach brings a team together in person specifically for moments that genuinely benefit from physical proximity, rather than mandating a fixed, uniform number of office days.
- Documenting decisions in a shared, written format prevents information from flowing more richly to in-person participants than remote ones in a mixed meeting.