Do you trust your remote workforce? The answer, surely is, that it depends.
Back in 2015, an article on Deseret News ran with the headline: Office workers don’t trust colleagues who work remotely.
It turns out that according to a survey among 2,000 workers carried out by Utah-based VitalSmarts in partnership with Training Magazine, office workers think remote workers are three times more likely to miss deadlines.
The survey also found that office workers felt remote workers were four times more likely to make a half-hearted effort.
Deseret News quoted David Maxfield, Vice President of Research at VitalSmarts who said: “When we are physically collocated, we get to know each other, we grow to like each other, we observe each other’s challenges and we cut each other more slack . . . When we don’t know a colleague, we often assume the worst. Social psychologists call this, The Fundamental Attribution Error — we attribute blame to people’s motives, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
Mr Maxell recommended quarterly visits to remote workers.
It is odd that in its survey it was suggested that remote workers could not be trusted to meet deadlines, because it is deadlines that provide the litmus test to remote workers. If they consistently fail to meet deadlines that office workers meet, then you know something is wrong.
Can you fully trust remote workers – it takes a rare person indeed who can find the self-discipline to work diligently from home, unless that person has clearly defined tasks – but then frankly in an office environment, clearly defined tasks are pretty important too.
There is nothing like deadlines to focus the mind, remote or non-remote worker.
Communication tools including Appear.In, in which, via a URL, workers and their supervisor can view each other via their computer camera, may promote trust of remote workers.
Or, there are project management tools that can work at a distance such as Trello, an electronic card based system for assigning tasks and checking on progress. BinFire, is a tool for managing remote teams, as is Basecamp: a tool for organising projects, internal communications, and client work in one place. Other good project management tools that work when members of a team are in different locations include Proofhub, Slack, Twproject and Wimi.
The key to building trust in remote working may lie in clearly laying down responsibilities and what people are expected to do.
But this may all boil down to the particular-individual, some can be trusted, some can’t.
A more pertinent question may relate to whether remote working is effective regardless of whether you can trust remote workers. This relates to the issue of whether people miss out by being at a distance from a core team, for example missing out on brainstorming, and drawing inspiration from the working environment and colleagues.
Dell
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Tags: Business, Workforce Transformation