Author Talks: Tsedal Neeley on why remote work is here to stay—and how to get it right

Trust is one of the most studied elements in virtual work. I’m talking about decades worth of work to try to determine the answers to questions such as “How do we establish trust?” “How do we maintain trust?” “What does trust look like when we barely see people in person and don’t have the opportunity to have the watercooler conversations and all the ways that we know we build trust?”

There are two types of trust. The first one is called cognitive trust, which is grounded in the belief and the understanding that others are dependable and have the competencies to be able to collaborate effectively on a common task. The second type of trust is called emotional trust. And it’s grounded in the belief that others have care and concern for us.

Leaders and managers must ensure that they are developing emotional trust with the people that they’re working with. People need to know that their managers and leaders care about them.

The cognitive trust you can almost confer right away. In virtual work, the term for this is actually swift trust—“Once I know you’ve got the qualifications to do the work, and once I know that you’re dependable, that you’re reliable, I will give you trust and we can get to work.”

But emotional trust takes much longer to develop, requires empathy, self-disclosure, and spending time with people, and it has this big temporal dimension. Time is really important for that second type of trust.