UberNoggin

Last week I spent time with two very different groups: Next Generation Consulting and Western Governors University. NGC consults with cities, corporations and other groups who want to improve their life/work balance and better suit the needs and talents of their employees.

WGU is an online university with over 12,000 students and employees who all work and live away from their Salt Lake City offices.

However different these two groups seem to be they have one powerful thing in common: they boht successfully manage virtual teams. Both WGU and NGC rely on distance communication to keep moving. THey have developed systems to trust and rely on people they seldom get to sit down with…a skill that so many companies and schools desperately need to figure out in today’s economy and technological workplace.

When I asked them how they do it folks from both WGU and NGC answered: “we trust people.” Sounds simple but its not. Trust is complicated. It’s based on experience and information but ultimately, at some point, we take a leap of faith or, as Communication scholars put it, “suspension.” At some point what we feel that what we know outweighs the risk of what we don’t know and crossing tht divide leads to trust. Of course, if we experience something tht contradicts what we thought we know and it causes the gap of suspension to be uncomfortably wide, we move from suspension to suspicion rather than trust.

So how does this process work in a virtual team environment?

For WGU, the faculty rely on very clear student expectations (Ie establishing a solid base of shared information) and then they communicate constantly to reaffirm that knowledge base and keep the need for suspension low. They trust that the person who completes the online assignment is the student of record because they communicate enough to narrow the need for suspension. They use phone calls, email, chat etc to reduce the unknown, to know their students perhaps better than brick and mortar faculty do.

For NGC, with employees is many locations, Rebecca and Marti (the founders of the company) trust their instincts about employees until “they give us a reason not to.” They build clear channels of communication and communicate as often as they can to keep their knowledge base stable. Meanwhile, their employees provide enough information to prevent their employers to have to widen their suspension gap.

So we get down to two questions: 1) how much information do we require to be comfortable enough with our suspension gap? and 2) What part does the trustee play in maintaining the knowledge base so it doesn’t come into question?

I would suggest that managers who can’t manage virtual teams probably have such a narrow suspension gap that they feel that they can never have enough info about what the distance employee is up to. Perhaps just being able to quantify how much information is enough could improve the relationship between manager and employee. Just being able to say “If you work at home I need ten status updates a day because I have a narrow suspension gap” might help both parties.

What do you think? How do you establish trust with people online? How do you manage virtual workers or how are you managed as one?

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