The Erosion of Trust
In her work as a body language expert, Vanessa Van Edwards has studied ways that body language impacts trust. One of the first things we notice when we see another person (in person) is their hands. This is a left-over survival mechanism from our ancestors. If you can’t see another person’s hands, a part of our brain called the amygdala becomes actively alert for potential threat and stays on alert for the duration of the interaction. While our conscious brains may recognize that our chances of getting physically hurt by someone that we are viewing on a remote computer screen are very low if not zero during the interaction, our primitive brain knows no such thing.
Now that many workers have become accustomed to meeting exclusively on Zoom or Teams or insert remote meeting platform of your choice, we more often experience each other as floating heads on camera, and we don’t always see a torso or hand gesture. Our virtual backgrounds can exacerbate the issue as well, like when we make a sudden hand gesture, and our hand disappears altogether as the virtual background software tries to keep up with what it should be displaying.
Without intending to, we may be activating the amygdala in each other on these meetings and eroding trust. This is not intentional and may not even be readily noticed, but as teams continue to function without seeing hand gestures and other body language from each other, we may just start feeling uneasy without being able to explain why. That uneasiness could be part of the fatigue that people are feeling when constantly in virtual meeting rooms.
While virtual meetings may not be going away, we may be able to stop this erosion of trust that could be happening and damaging team morale without us explicitly noticing. Here are a few things you can do to begin rebuilding these basic trust signals on your team.
What to do to rebuild trust
Wave at the beginning of meetings – As people join the meeting and you are doing a greeting at the start of the meeting – lift your hand up and wave (open palm facing camera) to the team. This way, your team members can see your hand and get a quick cue right from the start that you are not hiding anything and that you come as a friend.
Use your hands to emphasize or explain as you talk – If you have a concept you are trying to communicate with your team, set your camera up so they can see your hand gestures and use intentional gestures to emphasize or explain points. I’m not suggesting interpretive dance here, but a few well placed gestures for emphasis or to highlight a point – like when discussing 3 phases of a project, hold up 3 fingers and then do the 1, 2, 3 as you describe each of those phases. Not only will it be more interesting to watch and listen, but your team will retain the information better if there is a visual cue along with the verbal.
Say the words – virtual high fives everyone, or sending a big virtual handshake and/or wave goodbye at the end of meetings – doing this will cue people to think about a hand shake or high five and will produce some of the same physical response as when we actually do the handshake.
If your team has deep trust issues, these steps won’t solve the problem, but may be a small first step you can do to restoring some trust. If your team doesn’t have a large trust problem, but you sense that there is something a little “off” with the team, perhaps it is lack of hand gestures and being able to see some of our visual trust cues that has the team a bit out of sorts. Try these things and see if that feeling gets a little better.
If you need some help restoring trust on your team, I’d be glad to help. Message me at nikki@ridgelinecoaching.com and let’s set up some time to talk. Until then, sending you a virtual handshake and warm wave till we meet again.
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