Psychological safety is one of the leading indicators of a high performing team. Yet, forging deep human relationships and building trust can be difficult when your team is distributed or largely interacts on screens.

Beyond the practical considerations of time zones, remote isolation, cultural differences, and “can you hear me now?” connection issues, there are added, real barriers in our psychology and biology that make building strong teams over distances and screens harder than for teams all in one place. Yet, with the right conditions, distributed teams can be stronger, more deliberate, and produce better results than ones where everyone shares the same lunch table.

In this talk, I will share my learnings on how to hone connection, communication, and collaboration on distributed teams. We will dive into how you can utilise these three aspects to help your engineers shape their day-to-day interactions for relationship building, design processes for creating trust, and fostering an inclusive culture. Regardless if you’re managing teams across the world or within the same building, learning these approaches will help you become more strategic, communicate better, and build highly aligned, well-connected and strong teams that deliver great products.