Level-up Engineering Top Methods for Building Trust in Virtual Teams
Interview with Anand Safi, Senior Engineering Leader at Mark43. He covers methods and metrics for building trust in virtual teams while telling his story of taking over a newly founded remote team and scaling it up.
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In this interview we're covering:
- Definition of trust in the workplace
- Differences between building trust in virtual teams vs the office
- Methods for building trust in a virtual team
- Encouraging team members to build trust among each other
- Measuring trust in a virtual team
- Feedback channels in virtual teams
- Anand's story of building trust in his virtual team
Excerpt from the interview:
"At the organizational level, the metric can be transparency around communication. Once you’ve built trust with individuals, you can build organizational trust on the back of that.
As an engineer, I used to think, “I wish leadership would tell us about every problem; there is no reason not to.” As a leader partaking in some of these conversations, I’ve had to realize how fluid strategic decisions are. I prefer going to my reports with concrete information rather than updates on discussions that may change by next week.
I put effort into coaching my team to understand the leadership's position. I assure them that we’re working on a strategy, and I’ll make sure to update them when we have a plan to execute. Their reaction lets you know how much they trust the organization."