Trust in Virtual Teams

I recently came across a guest-post by Chris Bowler on Anywired.com titled Building Trust In a Virtual Team. I wanted to share it here because as we continue to develop our training materials and workshops I have noticed what I consider to be a recurring misconception among organizations attempting to transition to virtual teamwork. While conducting pre-workshop surveys or talking with clients it often surfaces that the biggest concern that many teams have is that technology is going to be the greatest challenge to working as a virtual team.

Yet, if you look at the results of almost any of the research into critical success factors for virtual teamwork you begin to see that activities like building trust and fostering informal communication play easily as large a role as technology in the success of your virtual team. But most organizations do not feel that they have to invest as much energy or attention in determining how they are going to approach these issues.

I thought that Mr. Bowler’s post was dead-on because he doesn’t talk around the issue: he says that trust is the biggest challenge, staight-up, and then he rolls up his sleeves and gives some real-world advice about how you can improve trust on your team.