Why Trust Is Harder to Build on a Screen… and How to Do It Anyway

There is a moment at the end of a long negotiation session that used to feel entirely natural. The other side packs up their papers, someone suggests coffee, and suddenly, in the ten minutes before the taxi arrives, the real conversation begins. You learn what they actually care about. You notice the hesitation when they talk about their board. You see them laugh. That moment, unplanned and unrepeatable, was one of the most trust-building in business.

And it no longer exists. At least, not in the way it used to…

I have been thinking about this since before my thesis on virtual large complex negotiations. Over the course of my research, I interviewed 16 senior executives and negotiation experts across Europe and came back with a finding that surprised even me: Trust has not disappeared in virtual negotiations.

But the way it is built has changed so fundamentally that many negotiators are still operating on assumptions that no longer apply.

The academic world is catching up to what negotiators, or anyone who is in a buy/ sell transaction with a customer, have been living. A 2024 study published in the British Journal of Multidisciplinary and Advanced Studies by Santos and Dias analyzed over 2,000 virtual conversations across 24 months and produced 15 specific recommendations for building trust remotely.¹ Their conclusion aligned closely with what my research participants described: trust in virtual meetings is fragile, deliberate, and highly dependent on consistent, transparent behaviour. And when it is absent, it is painfully obvious.

The same researchers, in a companion paper in the European Journal of Theoretical and Applied Sciences,² went further. They argued that our academic understanding of trust in negotiations still contains a missing link, the connection between the emotional, in-person dynamics that trust has historically relied on, and the virtual environment that now dominates commercial negotiations. That missing link is exactly what I found in my research.

From Feeling to Performing: The Trust Shift Nobody Planned For

In-person negotiations gave us an extraordinarily rich environment for building what psychologists call “affective trust”, the kind of trust grounded in emotional connection, shared experience, and reading someone’s character. You could watch how they interacted with their colleagues before the meeting started. You could sense when something was bothering them. You had lunch together. These signals were constant and, for the most part, unconscious. We processed them without even realising it.

Virtual negotiations stripped all of that away. A 2024 study published in ScienceDirect confirmed what my participants were already experiencing: affective trust actually becomes less reliable as virtuality increases.³ The greater the portion of your relationship is on a screen, the less charm you have, and the more reliability you need.

In one of my research participants, who put it in a phrase that I have not forgotten:

“Trust used to be built over coffee, now it is built through consistency. “

The shift between emotional and spontaneous, and cognitive, procedural, and demonstrable, is perhaps the most significant change in how large, complex B2B transactions are won or lost today.

Cognitive trust is based on competence. It is built on what you do, rather than who you are. The minor behaviours are disproportionate in virtual negotiations: is your recap email correctly reflective of what was actually agreed, did you show up on time, did you do what you said you would do by Wednesday? One of my participants explained it in a very simple way:

“I always conclude each meeting with a summary of who owns what. Each of them walks away with a written agreement. That is the way you prevent misunderstandings. It is not merely good project management. That is trust architecture.”

What We Lost When the Hallway Disappeared

This is another aspect that most negotiators overlook: the informal interaction is not only a social inconvenience that is lost. What was going on in the hallway, at the coffee machine, on the walk to the car, was, in fact, doing important work. It was creating relational context; a background knowledge of who the other individual is, what stresses they are experiencing, and what they actually desire.

It was plainly stated by one participant, who had years of experience in negotiating in major European events:

“Virtual agendas compress time. You make the call, and they all vanish. No hallway scene, no refreezing.”

This is not an emotional cost; it is a strategic cost. Informal social interaction was listed among the fundamental processes according to which trust is established in large complex negotiations in the recent qualitative study, The Seven Forces That Shape Trust in Virtual Negotiation (2024).⁴ When that mechanism disappears, something deliberate has to replace it. And most negotiators have not built that replacement yet.

The cultural dimension matters here too. One of my participants, working in the Middle East, was unambiguous:

“In this region, deals are built on trust first, not numbers. You have to share meals before you share slides.”

The rules of virtual trust do not apply uniformly across cultures, and negotiators operating internationally need to understand where cognitive trust alone is sufficient, and where the absence of affective trust is a dealbreaker.

How to Do It Anyway: Four Things That Actually Work

My research, supported by a 2025 systematic review of trust in temporary team systems by Ashley K. Barrett, confirms that trust in virtual contexts must be actively engineered rather than passively accumulated.⁵ Here is what the best negotiators are doing:

First, accept that in-person meetings are no longer routine, which means they become extraordinarily powerful. Nearly every participant in my research described using a single early in-person meeting to establish the relational foundation for months of virtual work. One participant explained it best:

“For most commercial negotiations, virtual trust is enough. But in strategic partnerships, one early meeting accelerates everything.”

Reserve in-person for what it does best: building the trust that lets everything else move faster.

Second, make your reliability visible. Cognitive trust is demonstrated, not felt. Send the recap email. Follow up when you said you would. Use names, reflect back what you heard, confirm understanding. One participant described his approach:

“I always make sure that I respond to their question. I literally say, ‘Is this in line with your understanding?’It demonstrates that I am listening and not merely attempting to shut up.”

It sounds small…. It is not.

Third, use your on-screen presence as part of your professional credibility. Clean background, camera on, consistent video quality, these are the new versions of a firm handshake and a nice looking shirt (or whatever your business outfit is, as long it is professional). They are an indication of care, preparation, and respect.

And fourth, create the unintentional instances. They are no longer accidental, and you must engineer them. Arrange the fifteen-minute coffee meeting without an agenda. Begin meetings five minutes beforehand. Use someone’s name. These scenes do not substitute the hallway, but they are the nearest thing we get.

A Final Thought

Virtual negotiations do not destroy trust. It has merely become a skill that needs to be developed, not passively acquired. Those negotiators who get this, who consider each email, each camera set, each follow-up a brick in the trust architecture, are the ones who are closing large complex deals that others cannot understand why they are losing.

The screen did not kill trust. It only made it more difficult to conceal behind personality. And to those who are willing to do the work, that is really a very good thing.

Thanks again, Tim H.

@misc{herglotz2026dn04,
  author       = {Herglotz, Tim},
  title        = {{Why Trust Is Harder to Build on a Screen… and How to Do It Anyway}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {3},
  number       = {4},
  howpublished = {Tim Herglotz, entry № 04},
  url          = {https://timherglotz.com/building-trust-in-remote-teams-why-its-hard-and-how-to-do-it/}
}