Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace, where we adventure into topics like transparency, authenticity, purpose, values and culture. In today's world of work. I am your host, Erin Patchell, and I'm on a quest to help companies turn business philosophy into business fact.
Today, we're going to turn the topic to trust. What is it? Why is it important? How do you know when you have it? And what do you do if you lose it?
Stay tuned.
It's hard to trust anything when so much of what we see, hear and read is highly curated and architected like a snapshot filtered, nipped and tucked into oblivion.
Trust is such a topic of deep meaning for most people because I think that all of us, at some point in our lives, have been hurt by someone we thought we trusted, and every single time that happens, our walls get a little bit thicker and taller.
As a business owner and a business leader, I really don't have to tell you how important trust is to build a strong and thriving team. It's such a foundational building block to every single relationship we have in our lives, and you also know that the research is extremely clear on the subject, so it should be easy.
We know how to build trust. We've read lots of articles on it. You follow three easy steps. You're honest, and you're reliable, you're accountable, and voila, trust is born.
You have corporate values. You put them on your website. This is how we do business. We care about transparency. We care about diversity. But is it really true?
It can be challenging, and I know that because I work with clients who are developing trust in their organizations, whether they're trying to improve employee retention or to create a high-performing creative culture within their organization.
The statistics also show the same thing. In 2021, Price Waterhouse Coopers did an annual global CEO survey, and only 18% of those CEO's said they were confident in their organizations. Ability to maintain trust, maintain trust in the current environment 18.
Gallup 2020 did a State of the Global Workplace survey measuring employee engagement and well-being, and only 40% of the employees that they surveyed said that they trusted the leadership in their organization. The research is also extremely clear that trust completely changes the way a company is capable of doing business.
American neuroscientist Paul J Zak wrote an article for HBR called The Neuroscience of Trust, and he discussed the research on the connection between trust and performance, finding that companies with high levels of trust had 50% higher productivity and 74% lower stress and 106 percent more energy than companies with low levels of trust.
That is completely mind-blowing, and we can keep going. Edelman, a global communications firm, surveyed in 2021 called the Trust Barometer report.
They found that 86% of employees who trust their employer plan to stay with the company for the next 12 months, compared to only 59 percent of employees who don't trust their employer. We've talked a little bit about why trust is important in an organization.
We know trust is important as people, right, like you, feel it every single day. You know that trust is an emotional process, and it's a cognitive process that we go through based on our entire history of experiences that we've had. And it's extremely instinctive, so it is such a gift when we find people and organizations whom we learn we can trust.
When we hire, work with or work for companies that embody trust, it's something that we can feel inside of our bones developing. A reputation or a brand that's built on trust takes quite a long time because it starts with developing relationships that are based on trust.
So how do you know if you have the trust of your team well?
Do your employees trust you to listen and respond in a healthy way?
I would personally get worried if it seemed like someone was just telling me what I wanted to hear all the time. To me, that would be a sign that I hadn't yet earned their trust or if my employees are making decisions, taking smart risks, and trying new things, and then letting me know how it went, you know, taking the successes of successes and learning from the failures, and that's a sign that they'll trust me to support their growth and development.
If employees are curious and enthusiastic about their work, they're communicating well together. It's a great sign that they're working in the right job. The culture is supporting them, and it's a trusted environment, and if they're loyal to the organization, this is a huge one. People are hopefully growing with your company, and they're staying there a long time.
If they're very loyal, they have a great trusting environment, a great trusted relationship. They're usually willing to go above and beyond their duties if a situation requires it, and if that's the case for your company, then bravo. You definitely have a high-trust organization.
It's a little bit ironic sometimes that a lot of employers focus so much effort on recruiting new talent, and they completely forget about their existing employees. It literally is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. The water keeps pouring at the bottom, and you keep pouring more water into the top just to try to fill it back up.
How would you know you needed to put more energy into building trust?
I want to try to say this first one delicately, but there's no delicate way to put it.
If you or anyone else on your team tends to react emotionally or aggressively to obstacles to challenging conversations or constructive feedback, you need to figure out how to manage that. And you probably have some work to do.
From what I've seen, personal conflict in the workplace that has been allowed to continue for too long might be the most detrimental factor. So being self-aware and being aware of the emotional climate of your workplace and then actually doing something about it.
There are some metrics that you can actually track most organizations at once they reach a certain number of employees, they start to track, you know, engagement and turnover rate, different kinds of turnover. So, if you're seeing low engagement and high voluntary turnover, then that's, of course, a signal. That there's probably something wrong. It doesn't. It doesn't always mean trust. Trust is one of the factors that you know is involved in engagement in turnover. It's not the only factor, but it definitely warrants further investigation.
It doesn't matter what size your company is. You can start to measure some of this data even when you're a small company, even if you're just one, two or three people.
Obviously, if it's just yourself, then maybe not. But if you're more than one person in your company, you can start to measure your company's engagement and turnover; you need to know some straightforward tools and tracking methods. It's well worth doing that because human beings, our memories are terrible, like objectively terrible. You know, reflecting on the information, the real information, can give you a lot of interesting insights.
The good news is that human beings are creatures that are completely capable of change. There have been so many demonstrations of organizations that have turned their entire culture around, and honestly, they kind of did it using those three easy steps, honesty, reliability and accountability.
It's a bit trickier than that. Yes, I think these things are the foundation for building or rebuilding trust, but where it gets a bit complicated is that it's how we demonstrate the principles in every single interaction that we have, and every decision that we make, both publicly and privately, that make the difference. And that's the part that's not always easy.
You know, we can't pretend to be ethical and think that no one's going to notice we can't pretend to be transparent. Without it creating more problems than it solves, I guess the whole point is that you need to practice what you preach, and that goes down to what organizational values. Well, organizational values only work if every person in the organization is actually working in alignment with those values.
So how do we know? How do we know that? That's true? How do we know that we have trust?
How do we know that we're in alignment with our values?
How do we know if we're being objective about it, and how do we know if we're getting better and better at it over time?
First, setting the intention to want to get better and better at it over time and to actually know what the truth is as a starting point, right?
So how are we benchmarking this?
How do we know what?
What is the current state looks like?
Are we getting honest with ourselves about it?
Are we doing surveys and focus groups, and interviews?
Are we being totally objective about this and seeing it from a more scientific perspective and the really fun thing about making something like this real?
Facing the reality of a situation publicly and then saying guess what, you all, this is a situation we've heard you. This is what we're going to do about it and then actually do something about it. Demonstrating what you're doing about it is the thing that will increase trust the most in your organization, making it right. Still, it does have to come from a place of conviction.
You have to have the conviction to want to have a high-trust organization, and I'll leave you with a little quote from Warren Buffett says it takes two to do the trust tango, the one who risks the trust and the trustworthy one, the trustee, each must play their role. It's totally true that trust goes both ways if you don't trust your team. Then they will need to trust you back, maybe a little bit of food for thought for next time.
That's all for now.
Thanks for listening!
If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/. I'm your host Erin Patchell, and remember, don't stay out of trouble.
