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🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

Imagine there’s a universal point system for doing every single thing you say you will do. You get 1,000 points at the start of every year. For every promise you fulfill, you get one additional point. For every promise you don’t fulfill, you lose a point.

How many points do you think you would have by the end of the year?

💡 Concept

Task-based trust is built by meeting deadlines, performing reliably, and consistently following through on promises. This trust is based on specific actions and behaviors, rather than on general character traits, reputation, or shared experiences.

It’s not just about doing the work that is assigned to you as part of your job requirements, or work that your colleagues and supervisors can access in project management tools. It’s also about doing the things you say that you will do in any professional context. Did you say you’d set up a time to connect two colleagues for an informational interview? What about those resources you promised to send to a coworker on a different team?

When you follow through on your promises, others see you as reliable, helpful, and memorable. This means that task-based trust is an essential component to impression management, which is the process of ensuring that your personal brand is portrayed in a positive light. It’s also an effective tool to help combat distance bias.

One of the most common barriers to flexible work is leadership's consistent paranoia that remote employees are not productive. That means that—in addition to promoting the success of teams and the individuals on them—building and maintaining task-based trust is critical for the future of flexible work in general.

🎬 Take Action

Here are some things you can do to build task-based trust:

• Document your action items consistently.

• Do what you say you will do.

• Meet deadlines.

• Follow any applicable guidelines or standards for completing work.

• Proactively provide updates and any changes in expectations.

• Visibly document incremental progress on long-term projects and large tasks.

• Let organizers know your plans for attending or missing meetings and events.

• Show up (on time) to meetings and events that you’ve RSVP’d yes to.

📄 Additional Resources

Access the Remote Work Dictionary

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

We dive deep into impression management and combatting proximity bias in the new version of our Growplaceless eCourse—newsletter subscribers are able to enroll for free by participating in our beta phase!

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