Hi there!

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my coaching client - a CFO in a Fintech company who shared her concern about building trust in a remote team. When she was in the office, communication went smoothly, collaboration was seamless, and ideas were shared with each other and developed into actionable plans. When the team was remote, they were okay fulfilling their tasks, but the team’s communication missed that spark they used to hve in the office. Why was that?

For many reasons. One of them is that we, as humans, really appreciate face-to-face connections where we can not only hear and see other people but also touch and smell. And even hearing and seeing is richer when we are offline. Online connection, even with super high-speed internet, isn’t like that. And it’s great when people can have those offline gatherings where they can experience this bonding and connect to each other on a more personal, deeper level.

But however nice it might be, you don’t need that on a regular basis. You can totally build great collaborative and trustful high-performing teams that work online, brainstorm online, and even socialize online. The reason why it can be so hard is that online collaboration requires a different approach. You can’t just take your old offline practices and start doing them over Zoom. You need to restructure and rethink how your team works.

For example, in an offline world, we always see each other while collaborating on something just because we are in the same room, and our eyes are open. And the natural tendency for many leaders is to require their team members to always have their cameras on during calls. While this might sound like a reasonable request, research shows that it is not always the case.

Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley have published their findings in the Academy of Management Journal, where they concluded that audio may often be more effective than video for task-focused calls, as it promotes better participation and equality in speaking time. However, video can be valuable in more emotionally driven or spontaneous interactions. And that is just one of the examples of how our biases for offline work affect online collaboration.

Cheers

Daria

P.S. Last week, my new Forbes Council article was published.

It’s about the five growth traps of fast-growing companies and includes insights from the CEO of Mews, a unicorn company and leading provider of cloud technology solutions for the hospitality industry.