Onsite vs remote: no-nonsense ways to rebuild trust regardless of team location

Part of my end-to-end Change Management delivery philosophy is to rebuild trust with leaders, stakeholders and teams after the change. This is part of the ‘Through” of my VIBRANT Change framework, and like every part of VIBRANT, you might need to and choose to do this at any point of the change (even at the very beginning!). I share lots of ideas to rebuild trust in Module 5 of Leading Successful Change: Measuring Success and Embed and my End-to-End Change Matrix. But how do you rebuild trust if your leaders, stakeholders and teams are dispersed across cities, states, or countries? Here’s my top tips.

The truth is, even onsite, it can be hard to get access to people because they might be busy or you might not have a relationship with them. Going past somebody's desk, if they don't know you from a bar of soap and you say, “Hey, how do you feel about x?” they might not feel comfortable to respond. 

Go layer by layer

So it might be layers of rebuilding trust where you might: 

• have conversations with the leadership team
• then have conversations with the senior stakeholders, senior leaders or managers 
• then have conversations with team members 

You could run listening session workshops where you just go, “Hey, understand this has happened. I'd love to hear more about it and how you’re feeling.” And you just ask open questions that help people share. I recommend splitting these groups out so you don’t have people’s manager in the room and they are more likely to give you honest feedback and share openly, and don’t rely on the manager to direct the conversation too much. So you might run a workshop layer by layer. You can do this in person, and you can do exactly the same process virtually by site or a mix of representatives at that level across sites.

Go to them

There’s also always the option to travel. If people are interstate, ask to be flown interstate. If people are international, ask to be flown international. You might need to go and have your boots on the ground in another city or another country in order to understand what's going on there. There's a reason that Change Management is mostly used to support projects and transformation. They have the budget. If they turn around and go, “Oh, we don't have the budget for that.” They usually do actually have the budget. So ask, “Do you want this to be successful?” I've flown around the country to do that. Once at the start of a change, we flew down to South Australia to visit a handful of different sites for proof of concept, and went back again for the next stage. There is often budget there. You could either do it virtually and manage the same process virtually or you could influence and negotiate to go on site to build that trust. No matter what anybody says about virtual, it is a lot easier to have open and honest conversations, build relationships and trust, and get better outcomes when you go to meet people in person. People are less distracted. For millions of years, we humans have been in-person people. And while we can absolutely build rapport virtually (I share more about this in Leading Successful Change in Module 3: Crafting Incredible Communications), there's always going to be a level of energetic block as soon as you put a computer screen in between. So getting there in person could be faster and more effective to rebuild trust.

Go to site

And finally if it is in your same city, definitely go to the site. If your company has five different sites in the same city that you live in, just be like, “Great, I'm going to spend the day working from this site.” As a Change Manager, you're not beholden to any team really. You'll often sit underneath the project team, but you can build relationships and build rapport with any team that you want across the business. And that's often a good way of getting good stakeholder outcomes is by building rapport across the business.

If still you’re curious about how to build trust and rapport with stakeholders instantly, watch my free 6 Ways to Build Trust video.

CLICK HERE to watch my 6 Ways to Build Trust Video

And if you’ve already watched the video and want to go deeper into advanced topics like rebuilding trust when embedding change, these are exactly what we talk about on the monthly coaching calls of my Leading Successful Change program. The next monthly coaching call will be Wednesday 6 November, so check out the LSC invitation page for all the advanced Change Management, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and Coaching tools and techniques you get in the program and come join us for our next monthly call. 

CLICK HERE to join our November Monthly Coaching Call

Lata xx