Find Ways to Insert Trust

What have you found to be the biggest roadblocks to effective teamwork?

In this hybrid environment, I think the biggest roadblock is trust. Since Covid at Compass, I think over 50% of our staff has been hired. So, in the last two and a half to three years, I think 50% of our team has been hired in that time where we’ve been largely remote, or not as in-person of a company as we work for Covid.
So how do you give people a sense of what the culture is? How do you build trust with people that you work with every day, but you may have never seen, touch, felt, been in-person with and had that spark of what it’s like to be in a room together with?
And so I think the biggest roadblock that we all have right now for effective teamwork and for fun, meaningful teamwork is trust. So, finding those ways to insert trust. If you can, once a quarter, once a year, bring people together in-person. If you can find virtual ways to facilitate conversations that are outside of the norm. Whatever those things are, whatever the markers of trust are for your team, for the personalities in your group that you’re working with, I think really leaning into that.
And then, by the way, don’t be afraid to call it out if you sense that there are low levels of trust across an entire team or across two different functional departments, or between you and another person, lean into it.
I like to say that bad news is not like wine. It doesn’t get better with age. So lean into the things that are bad or difficult or feel like there isn’t trust there, because I think sometimes the more you and this is relevant, your personal life, too, the more you lean into those conversations.
Actually, I think it’s no longer like the elephant in the room, and you can work together to improve it and build upon it.