Nurturing Trust in a Virtual Space

I’ve launched my 7 Week Resiliency Workshop online, and we had two zoom meetings so far: a kick-off meeting the day before the workshop started, and one-week debriefing meeting yesterday. The participants have told me that they love the connection with other members, and they enjoy being authentic and sharing their knowledge and experience in the virtual community. I found out that it is called “swift trust.”

In his Harverd Business Review article “How to Build Trust in a Virtual Workplace,” Keith Ferrazzi says:

Recognize that when groups first form, people are usually willing to give others the benefit of the doubt. The prevailing feeling is that “we’re in the same boat together”: success will reflect well on everyone, whereas failure could hurt people’s careers. So people initially operate in a positive atmosphere of “swift trust.” (This is what colloquially we might call the “honeymoon period” of a relationship). 

I realized that this was happening in my workshop participants. This was what I was doing naturally without knowing the term “swift trust.” My practice of building swift trust started long time ago.

I have been a strong believer of a sense of community. I believe whatever team we are in, if we can create a sense of community, we always have a better communication, collaboration, and cocreation. This belief started when I first worked as a language teacher. I made sure that in the initial class, we have a good quality self introduction. Then during the course, each student in the classroom has a chance express themselves. I do the same as an intercultural trainer, program facilitator, or a coach. Every time I offer any session, I make sure that each participant gets to know people in the group. For this Resiliency Workshop, I have breakout room sessions for the participants to interact with each other to talk about themselves and learn about each other.

I found another article about swift trust: “How to Build Trust with Colleagues You Rarely See” written by Tsedal Neely. In addition to swift shift, the author mentions about passable trust.

Passable trust does not have to be complete or perfect. In contrast to swift trust, which is quickly established and may just as quickly evaporate when the job is done, passable trust can exist as a permanent state without anyone expecting that it must deepen or develop. The transparency of interactions on social media (work-related and non-work related) and the time spent messaging about personal information is enough. For global teams who communicate largely via electronic technology, passable trust is especially useful.

My workshop is using a Facebook group function, and the participants are asked to respond to a question I ask every day. They will read other participants posts and respond or comments. I believe this passable trust has been built in the past one week, that the participants are feeing very emotionally connected to each other

Of course, I did this workshop knowing that it will build a great community, and I did intentionally facilitated and elicited interactions, but it is very exciting to read that there are names for what I have been doing and they are actually effective to build trust especially in a virtual space.