How can you develop trusted relationships across a global team?
Building trust in hybrid and global workforces takes more than technology.
Hybrid and global teams mean many leaders rarely see half their colleagues in person. Virtual meetings have become central to daily work, but convenience can mask a quiet erosion of trust and collaboration. To maintain strong professional relationships across borders and time zones, we need to be far more intentional about how we connect online and deliberate about when we choose to meet in person.
The technology now available to us may be sophisticated, but our brains haven’t evolved at the same pace. Trust is still built through eye contact, small, shared rituals, and interactions as simple as a handshake. In virtual meetings, those cues are blunted or disappear altogether.
Unless we deliberately redesign how we interact online, teams can quietly lose the conditions that make collaboration easy: mutual understanding, psychological safety and the confidence that “these are people I can rely on”.
Take a look at this article, written by myself, Dr Lynda Shaw, and Francesca Lagerberg, and discover some simple steps you can take to create genuine connection and build deeper trust among your team members, wherever they are…