How to Build Trust in a Team

October 19, 2021 - 10 min read

Kelechi Udoagwu

As the world of work continues to change post-COVID-19, many organizations are scrambling to regain control and normalcy with teams and employees working in multiple locations.

Managers are seeking new ways to engage, empower, and motivate their workforce to improve organizational trust and boost productivity as workers settle into new routines.

A company culture of trust makes a huge difference in how workers bounce back, re-engage, and enhance their productivity at work. In trying times, employees want to know that they are valued by their teams. They want their voices to be heard, and they want to trust that the organizations they work for have their best interests at heart.

Changing conditions like the now-deescalating pandemic make employees feel unsafe and uncertain in their jobs and futures with an employer. An organization that takes measures to assure its people of a continued commitment to their goals and values will see significant benefits compared to one where employees do not know where they stand.

Why does trust matter at work?

Studies from the Great Place To Work Institute show that companies with high-trust cultures reap greater financial success than those that don't. In a deep dive into the neuroscience of trust in organizational culture, employees in high-trust companies, when compared to those in low-trust environments, report:

106% more energy at work
76% more engagement
74% less stress
50% higher productivity
40% less burnout overall
29% more satisfaction with their lives
13% fewer sick days

These gains are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to why trust at work matters. A lack of team trust leads to avoidable work conflicts, missed deadlines, collaboration issues, and even marketing and communication mishaps.

With most teams working remotely for the first time, building trust in teams has never been more crucial for the survival and growth of an organization. Trust at work creates a healthy environment to produce consistent quality outputs and increasing returns.

Understanding the stages of team building

Team building influences how employees relate with each other on and off work grounds. Your organization may be fortunate to attract and recruit high-performing talents, but if you can't get them to work together, it becomes difficult to retain them in the long run.

Strong teams develop according to patterns and become more prolific and productive over time. Knowing this, managers can guide their teams towards a culture of trust, innovation, and feedback, creating a safe place where workers can grow and contribute ideas without fear or embarrassment.

The following five stages of team building were put together by researcher Bruce Wayne Tuckman and doctoral student Mary Ann Jensen. These stages of team building define a roadmap to building collaborative, high-trust, and high-performing teams.

Five stages of team building

Forming: Team members are introduced. It's important for managers and team leaders to facilitate this first meeting and highlight each team member's background and experience. Team members may also receive important organizational information, new project details, and the opportunity to ask questions about their work and get to know team members.
Storming: Team members share and listen to ideas as they get to know each other and their roles and positions better. Team leaders and managers can facilitate this stage by organizing team building activities to encourage bonding and competition among team members and break the ice with communication, problem-solving, and creative games. This stage may come with some personality clashes and conflicts as team members try to curry favor for their suggestions, opinions, and perspectives about how to get things done within the team. Members might disagree over how to complete a task or project. It is important to remember that teams experience conflict. Guide team members towards positive outcomes, and keep everyone focused on resolving the goals or tasks at hand.
Norming: Team members learn to work together. At this stage, each person's goals and responsibilities should be clear. Managers and team leaders must explain the organizational systems and ways of working. This includes processes for communicating project-related issues, solving problems, reviewing and approving work, and synchronizing cross-functional collaboration.
Performing: Team members collaborate and work together. There are increasing levels of trust and cohesion between team members and teams. Employees are operating at peak efficiency with processes in place and less oversight from managers. Snags, schedule conflicts, and other issues may occur, but team members have strategies for resolving these problems without compromising timelines and project progress.
Adjourning: Team members complete projects and meet to review what went well and what should be improved for future project planning and execution.

How to build trust in teams as a leader

As a leader, how you go about building trust in teams impacts how members behave. High-trust leaders cultivate trust by setting and communicating clear directives and giving teams what they need to accomplish their tasks.

Low-trust managers take on the added workload of micro-managing their workers to increase productivity and hours logged, eroding trust further. Good team leaders should instead institute clear processes and workflows that enable tasks and projects to get done without redundant check-ins, interruptions, and supervision.

Here are seven helpful measures, backed by team building science, for leaders and managers to follow to build trust in their teams:

Encourage bonding

Build interpersonal relationships between teams and employees with team building trust activities. This helps to eliminate silos, friendship cliques, and office politics that can inhibit collaboration between teams. Organization-wide bonding strategies, like assigning peer buddies and department mentors, also help to reduce an us vs. them mentality between teams and their managers.

Maintain consistency

Maintain consistency by ensuring the leadership and management teams do what they said they would do. In cases where a change of plan or tactics is necessary, make sure to keep team members in the know, even going as far as to provide the reasons behind the decisions. This builds a high-trust environment where employees believe in the organization, its mission, and the usefulness of their tasks.

Create processes

Create a clear process for giving and receiving reviews and ensuring remote work accountability to avoid the trap of micro-managing teams and projects. Clear processes clarify requirements, standards, and expected results, so every team member knows what they have to do and when.

Give praise

Give credit and praise to whom it is due, regardless of their position and role within the team. The neuroscience of trust shows that recognition has the most positive effect when it occurs immediately after a goal is met, when it comes from leaders, and when it's tangible, unexpected, personal, and public. Recognizing excellent performance within your teams uses the power of the crowd to celebrate successes, keeps progress transparent, and inspires other team members to aim for excellence.

How to Build Trust in Teams 2 — Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Allow autonomy

Give people discretion in how they complete their tasks. Allowing levels of autonomy in your team gives each employee room to make decisions and take risks within their role to complete tasks and achieve the organization's goals. Once your team members have been through training, give them increasing room to execute projects their way. Trusting your teams to do their jobs motivates and promotes innovation in how they approach their work.

Communicate often

Share information broadly and transparently. Keep your teams updated on any changes regarding projects they're involved in. Uncertainty about the organization’s direction can lead to stress and burnout, so let your employees know about changes within the company or any of its initiatives. They should hear about them from the leadership team first. Doing this makes ambassadors of your employees — they understand and believe in the mission and actions of the company because they are included.

Invest in your people

Finally, high-trust workplaces help their teams and members develop holistically. They adopt a growth mindset when developing talent within the organization, creating opportunities for managers and direct reports to meet and discuss the whole-person growth, which includes both a professional and personal focus. Organizations that invest in their people have a higher chance of retaining talent and improving engagement.

So there you have it — seven steps explaining how to build trust in a team. Each step empowers both managers and team members to take more responsibility in their roles, get involved in the organization's activities, and give their best every chance they get.

Team building trust activities to get things going

Depending on your post-pandemic work arrangement, you have various options for team building trust activities. Your selection would depend on whether your teams work in the office, remotely, or in a hybrid arrangement.

Here are a few resources to choose the best team building trust activities for your team:

The ultimate guide to team building activities that don't suck: This includes 20+ team building activities and games for in-office and remote teams
13 awesome team building games: This includes team building games for new hires and teams warming up to each other
4 team building activities for your hybrid workforce: This includes team building trust activities for connecting a hybrid team
Virtual team building activities and icebreakers: This includes a complete guide to virtual team building and lots of virtual team building activities and icebreakers

How to create a trust-building strategy with Wrike

Building trust in teams brings immense benefits. You want employees to be confident enough to make decisions and take risks that serve the business. You need processes and workflows that support teamwork and external collaboration. You also want to ensure that there's a high level of security in the digital systems and tools you use to accomplish work tasks.

Wrike enables all these and more by providing a secure source of truth accessible for teams to work and send updates whether in-office, remotely, or in a hybrid environment.

Create a trust-building strategy by implementing clarity, consistency, and quality review measures with Wrike. Wrike can help build team trust through:

Clarity: Outline your organization's main objectives and priorities to align teams on their goals and contributions. Employees work efficiently when they have a clear vision of where the company aims to go and what role they're to play. Wrike provides a central dashboard showing key metrics, notifications, and an activity stream reminding team members of what’s important. Multiple project views, including Gantt charts, show project progress and timelines at a quick glance.
Consistency: Teamwork succeeds when members trust each other to deliver and complement their contributions with excellence and enthusiasm. When there's trust at work, everyone depends on the others to come through with consistent efforts and good results each time. Wrike provides standard and customizable workflows for teams to collaborate and contribute to projects. There are also review and approval functionalities within the software to ensure each team member’s work is up to standard each time.
Communication: Honest, safe, and open communication are essential elements for a high-trust team. When team members know they can reach others easily to handle issues or get answers to questions, there’s more trust and productivity. Wrike provides project-related communication and collaboration features helping to create and execute project work and team trust-building strategies. Encourage better teamwork by inviting collaborators into your Wrike workspace and including them in all project-related conversations and updates.

Get started with a two-week free trial today and discover how to build trust in a team with Wrike.

Kelechi Udoagwu

Kelechi is a freelance writer and founder of Week of Saturdays, a platform for digital freelancers and remote workers living in Africa.

#Team Management #Future of Work #Employee Productivity

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Making Mistakes at Work: What to Do if You're in the Wrong

All of us have felt the fear of admitting when we’ve made a mistake at work. We may be terrified to tell our manager, or nervous about the impact our mistake could have on the business. But mistakes are completely normal and should be viewed as an opportunity to grow. This article aims to provide a deeper insight into why this fear of making mistakes at work exists and how to overcome it. We’ll also provide advice to managers on how to react and problem solve collaboratively as a team. Why is there a fear of making mistakes at work? Making mistakes at work can be scary. This is especially true if you’re the sole breadwinner of your household or rely on your position for everyday expenses like rent. When the stakes are high, it’s normal to worry about what-if scenarios when something goes wrong. In rare cases, extreme perfectionism is diagnosed as atelophobia which is the extreme fear of making mistakes. While these are all valid reactions, making mistakes at work can actually improve your relationship with management and provide opportunities for self-improvement. But first things first, you have to adjust your mindset and overcome those fear-based feelings that are keeping you paralyzed. Overcoming the anxiety of making mistakes at work If you’re like most people, you probably feel a knot in your stomach when something goes wrong at work. It could have been a minor mishap that no one noticed or a major mistake that cost your company a huge sum of money. Regardless of what happened, overcoming the anxiety of making mistakes at work is the first step to finding a solution. If you skip this part of the process, you may find yourself covering up issues that could have been fixed, making things worse long-term, or even getting found out by your boss. Follow these steps to overcoming work-related stress and bounce back stronger than before after you’ve messed up: Step 1: Process your emotions It’s natural to feel frustrated and embarrassed when something goes wrong at work. But, after a few seconds, the feeling should pass and you can begin to think logically. If it doesn’t happen quickly, take some time to process these emotions. Talk it out with a trusted friend, voice journal about it in your car, or take a walk outside to get some fresh air before starting fresh. It can be hard to maintain a sense of balance when you’re upset. Try to make sure that your emotional response is proportional to the mistake you made. Step 2: Keep perspective If you make an error at work, it’s likely not a life-or-death situation. Most of the time, it can be corrected or resolved quickly. If you don’t find the right perspective, your mind may get too focused on the negative consequences of your mistake, which can trigger more errors in the future. Step 3: Acknowledge the mistake If you need to apologize for an error, do it quickly and politely. If it’s a small issue, a sentence or two via email or chat messenger is enough to make amends. If it’s a larger issue, consider holding a meeting or giving your manager a quick phone call. Also, make sure to tell your boss about how you intend to prevent this mistake in the future. Step 4: Review your response It’s so easy to get distracted by all your other goals and projects that you can forget about anything else that went wrong before you got to this point. Taking the time to review your response to the mistake helps you improve in case it ever happens again. Ask yourself questions. Do you make the same mistake over and over again? If so, what changes can you make to prevent this from happening? Step 5: Practice self-care Getting back into a healthy routine can help you release pent-up energy and prevent making mistakes at work in the future. To some, the concept of self-care may seem like a trend or luxury. But making sure you’re feeling your best is critical for improving your confidence and your performance at work. Issues such as sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, and dehydration can lead to mistakes you otherwise wouldn’t have made if you had been taking better care of yourself. Step 6: Evaluate your own performance The easiest way to earn people's trust is to consistently deliver stellar work. Even though you may have failed in the past, there's still time to move on and create a successful and rich working life. Remember, a mistake or two over the course of an otherwise successful period will not make or break your career. How should managers react to mistakes at work? Managers are responsible for reacting to and assisting employees with mistakes at work. Even in the most high-pressure situations, doing so with care is not only good for morale but will prevent similar mistakes in the future. How a manager reacts to mistakes at work can make all the difference between transformational leadership and losing otherwise great employees. Great managers understand that we can all learn from our mistakes. Mistakes help us develop as individuals and as a team. Great managers can also recognize when they themselves have made mistakes. Before you approach a team member, take a close look at yourself to see if you're really worried about their work. If so, what do you think about their performance? Who is responsible for their work so far? You may find that you’ve contributed to the environment, the process, or the miscommunication that made the mistake possible. Reflecting on this ahead of time will relieve everyone of playing the blame game and instead solve the problem from a fair and level-headed place. Additionally, managers should make sure that each mistake is a teaching moment. It may be hard but don't try to fix the problem. Instead, frame it as an opportunity to improve and develop. When approaching an employee who has made a mistake, start by being curious about it. Ask questions about what happened and what their perspective is on the situation. Use active listening skills when speaking to team members, as it will let them know that you are paying attention. They may fess up immediately. If they take the blame for something that wasn’t their fault, which is pretty common, address that. If they don’t admit to making a mistake, approach the situation with care and focus on the issue, not placing blame. Give the team members the autonomy to figure it out on their own. Then, provide your feedback in a fair and balanced manner. Afterward, encourage them to learn from it and avoid repeating the same mistake. When communicating with an employee who has made a mistake, in-person meetings are often best. However, many teams are now made up of contractors, gig workers, and freelancers who work remotely so a physical location is not always accessible. If that’s the case, lean on digital tools to illustrate the issue. For example, reports and individual task assignment lists from project management tools. These can also be used to prevent future mistakes, as managers can easily use them to communicate the actions and behaviors expected of team members and improve the overall work management process. There may be times when mistakes happen over and over again. If that’s the case, the employee may be engaging in a pattern of behavior that keeps them from performing at their best. Managers can step in and provide ideas for healthy habits that will prevent the same type of mistake from cropping up again. For example, you can ask a marketing team member to overcome a common marketing mistake of missing a content publishing deadline by writing a to-do list every day. This will help them stay on top of their tasks while also motivating them to finish their work at the same time. In a nutshell, it’s important to understand that punishment for infrequent mistakes is unfair and ineffective. These mistakes offer opportunities to improve, which both managers and employees can embrace. How to admit a mistake in a professional environment You may end up in a situation in a professional environment where an apology is needed. And when it comes to making mistakes at work, honesty is the best policy. Certain actions can break trust, but an apology can help rebuild it. In your explanation, it's important to detail why you acted the way you did. It shows that you care about how those around you are affected by your actions. It's important to address the person you're apologizing to by name, regardless of their status. Having an open conversation can help both of you understand the other person better, and it can prevent an insincere apology from happening. If the mistake you made affected someone personally, it's important to validate the feelings of the other person. Having the courage to admit that you're sorry can make a huge difference in how people treat you. Take responsibility for your actions and have a plan in place for how to make amends before you approach the appropriate person or people. Having a plan in place shows that you're thinking about how to make things right. You may even want to read about examples of taking responsibility at work and model your behavior on whichever feels appropriate for the situation. However, don’t get carried away and make promises you can’t keep. It's important to set goals that are realistic so that you can avoid repeating the mistake. If your apology is accepted, you can then try negotiating a solution by asking the other person to reflect on the situation and consider their feelings. After you apologize, make a greater effort to keep your promises and not repeat the same mistake. Doing so can help improve the situation and make the other person feel more comfortable. How to learn from mistakes at work It's important to come clean and admit your mistake, but it's also important to move forward with a positive mindset. You'll most likely feel a bit down about your mistake right after it happens. But by learning from it, you can improve and become more resilient in the long run. Start by creating a plan for improvement. If you made a minor mistake, then creating personal goals and action plans will help you put those lessons into action. You can learn a universal lesson from nearly any situation, no matter how unique it is. For example, if you learned that a mistake was made because of your forgetfulness, implementing organizational strategies to improve your memory could help. Next, keep track of progress over time in a notebook or virtual document. Be sure to note the highlights along with the lowlights. Look for patterns. As they come up, add them to your action plan or personal goals list. Monitor whether or not these changes have led to better, more consistent outcomes. If not, adjust and keep going. Lastly, don't be afraid to ask for help if you're unsure which strategy or tool will work best for you. Managers are there to support your performance. If you approach them with honesty and vulnerability, they’ll likely be flattered you thought to ask. They may even offer advice or make changes that will improve productivity for you and the rest of the team. In conclusion The pressure to perform at a high level can often result in mistakes and inefficient habits. Learn from your mistakes and take ownership of them. Communicate in an open and honest manner. Ask for or provide help when needed and remember that every new mistake is also an opportunity for better performance. How Wrike can help you avoid unnecessary mistakes at work With so many files, folders, updates, and chat threads to keep track of, mistakes are easily made when you try to get through your day without a work management platform. Wrike offers a variety of features to help you stay on top of your workload easily, and avoid unnecessary confusion that can lead to mistakes at work. Full project visibility, including real-time updates and approvals, means that you can ensure every stakeholder is informed of what you're working on, with your tasks going to the correct approver every time. One shared space with over 400 app integrations means communication has never been easier, no matter where you or your team are based. And Wrike's Automation Engine allows you to streamline your processes and automate the time-consuming admin tasks that, when tackled manually, can easily be done incorrectly. Try it out for yourself with a free two-week trial.

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How to Build Trust in a Team

Why does trust matter at work?