Trust
I’ve mentioned before that I used to run a software development agency with mostly remote clients. I have a vivid memory of a CFO calling to question the number of hours billed for a subcontractor.
“It’s more hours than there are in a month.”
Well, that wasn’t true. It was more than eight hours/day * twenty-one days but just barely. It was a busy time in the project and the team was working especially hard.
Hourly billing for knowledge work is tricky business at the best of times unless you have small, clearly recognizable deliverables. You need to have trust established between the team and the stakeholders plus a shared understanding of the outcomes.
Trust takes time to build, and in a remote or distributed arrangement, it also takes a great deal of intentionality.
Looking back, it’s clear to me that we were missing the right level of proactive, transparent communication about how the team was progressing in a time-and-materials engagement continually flirting with scope creep.
Lack of trust and/or lack of proactive communication drives anxiety in stakeholders engaged with remote vendors. A similar anxiety inflicts managers and executives struggling to manage remote workers.
Quick tangent: I don’t hear it anymore but in tech consulting we used to joke about WIMP and WISCA management (“why isn’t Mary programming” and “why isn’t Sam coding anything”). The underlying false belief is that a software developer isn’t doing valuable work if they’re not at their desk typing.
It sounds absurd to anyone in my industry and yet it’s not very far removed from the belief that workers have to be in the office for eight hours every day so we can see that they’re working.
You can spot the dysfunction here, right? Managers or customers are looking for signs of activity instead of outcomes.
The right quantity and quality of communication leads to increased confidence that progress toward an outcome is happening.
Each outcome successfully achieved increases trust.
Each escalation or well-articulated warning about an emerging problem further increases trust.
As trust increases, the quantity of communication can decrease.
And everyone lives happily ever after….
Except that this is so easy to neglect. A few days lost in an all-consuming issue can cause me to overlook proactively communicating that something will be late/missed/dropped/rescheduled. And I definitely know better. And I understand that trust erodes as a result. That take us back to the word I used earlier: intentionality.
Routines, systems, and lists help a lot. I do better when I have a list on good old-fashioned paper on my desk. The past few years I’ve been rocking a yellow legal pad immediately next to my mouse and keyboard. I have to reach over it to get to my coffee mug. (Only one incident of a coffee-soaked list so far this year.)
When you’re busy, low priority items get dropped either intentionally or through neglect. My list keeps the most important things from falling off my radar. And it is focus on the most important outcomes that most strongly reinforces trust.
What works for you to build/reinforce trust in distributed environments or as a remote worker? Shoot me an email or leave a comment on LinkedIn so more of us can learn from each other.
- Derek
P.S. - I’m based on the east coast of Canada. If you’re a Maritimer like me, you might be interested to know that I’m co-organizing Maritime DevCon again this year and will be hosting a panel discussion on distributed teams and remote/hybrid work. Details at https://maritimedevcon.com.