Without trust there is nothing

Welcome to 2022. During 2021 I wrote and spoke about leadership, workforce resilience, and change.

Subtopics included leadership capability uplift to lead high performing hybrid teams, psychological safety, employee mental health and wellbeing, employee value proposition, empathetic leaders, employee empowerment and autonomy, equity and inclusion, employee attraction and retention, and organisations becoming more humanistic.

At the foundation of all these subjects and the bedrock on which they all reside is TRUST.

Without trust, you may as well pack up your bags and go home. Teams will not be high performers if they do not trust their leaders and their colleagues. Employee mental health initiatives will be wasted unless employees trust that their employer has their wellbeing at its core of its values. Employee empowerment and autonomy has no outcome unless there is trust. There will not be equity and inclusion without trust. Organisations and their leadership without employee trust will not attract or retain talent.

History repeating itself

Despite all this, the conversation is not new.

In 2002, Kurt Dirks and Donald Ferrin collected research on trust in leadership from over 27,000 people in 106 different studies. The research paper’s authors say that employees’ trust in their leader is based on mutual care and concern. Employees who trust leaders more are less likely to intend to quit, they tend to believe information from their leader more, and they seem to commit to company decisions more than if they don’t trust their leader as much. The researchers found higher job satisfaction and higher commitment to the organization were both linked to higher trust in leaders. 

In February 2003, Robert M. Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau wrote an article called “The Enemies of Trust” for Harvard Business Review (HBR) and described the links between trust and corporate performance.

“If people trust each other and their leaders, they’ll be able to work through disagreements. They’ll take smarter risks. They’ll work harder, stay with the company longer, contribute better ideas, and dig deeper than anyone has a right to ask. If they don’t trust the organization and its leaders, though, they’ll disengage from their work and focus instead on rumours, politics, and updating their résumés.” 

In HBR in 2017, Paul J. Zak wrote an article called “The Neuroscience of Trust” and said:

“In my research I’ve found that building a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.”

And only last year,

Research from Great Place to Work – 2021 Best Workplaces – stated:

“Great Place to Work’s research shows that when employees feel that they can trust their leaders, they repay the company with higher levels of commitment and engagement that shines through to the bottom line.”

Trust in 2022

As we enter 2022, with ongoing talk of The Great Resignation, trust must be front and centre of every organisational strategy for business success. I have written extensively about The Great Resignation being a direct result of The Great Realisation. During 2020 and 2021, employees have reflected on what is important to them both in their personal and work lives and realised that they deserve more from their employers.

According to research that Microsoft conducted in March 2021, one month before the US reported a record 4 million resignations, 41% of the global population is planning to leave their current role within the next year and 46% want to make a significant transition in their career.

There is no time like the present to take stock and intentionally establish trust in your organisation, if it is missing, before your talent walks out the door and down the virtual road to your competitor whose door is wide open.

It will be your competitor that reaps the benefits of trust including increased:

• morale and motivation

• employee engagement

• organizational alignment

• teamwork and collaboration

• speed and efficiency

• productivity and profitability

• employee wellbeing

• loyalty and retention

• innovation and creativity

Dr. Toby Travis, author of the book “TrustED: The Bridge to School Improvement’ describes trust as a bridge. Mark C. Perna explains the Travis analogy in his December 2021 Forbes article “If Trust Is A Bridge, Here’s Why Employees Aren’t Crossing It”

“Trust is like a bridge. If we perceive a well-maintained bridge, we may not consciously consider potential instability during our morning commute. But if the bridge develops potholes and has frequent lane closures due to repairs, we may no longer trust it as we once did.” 

Most of us travel over bridges without really thinking about the possibility of instability. We trust it will be ok. This is where your downfall can come, and that is assuming that the foundation of trust between employer and employee exists when it does not.

Not everyone can stay out of the workforce just because there is lack of trust in a company, but everyone has access to the information that can make or break that company’s reputation for trustworthiness. 

The damage of the pandemic

The events of 2020, 2021 and ongoing into 2022 have caused the trust in many organisations to deteriorate. As the adage goes, “trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.”

The unprecedented changes brought about by the pandemic found many organisation’s executives and managers in uncharted territory and some of the resulting actions damaged whatever trust may have existed pre-pandemic.

Surveillance

In March 2020 global demand for employee surveillance software increased by 74% compared with the 2019 monthly average. In April 2020, the increase was 66% compared to the same time in the previous year. These figures shared by Top10VPN revealed how many organisation’s managers were not ready for the abrupt shift to remote working.

Whilst there may be valid reasons for employee monitoring such as detecting employees working long hours and intervening to support their mental well-being; detecting unethical behavior; threat detection and security breach alerts; these were not the reasons for the increase in demand for surveillance software. This increase was due to managers panicking because they could no longer see if an employee was at their desk or not. This translated to “I don’t know if you are working.” It also screamed “I don’t trust you.”

Micromanagement

The crux of the matter is that most managers were not prepared to lead a remote team. Leading a remote team requires a different skillset than face-to-face management. Most managers received little or no support for this rapid transition and as they struggled to adapt their employees struggled even more.

The struggle led many managers to resort to micromanagement of their employees. Rather than regularly checking-in on their wellbeing they were checking-up on their activity. These managers were unable to provide their employees with empowerment and autonomy to do the job as they saw fit. Micromanagement also screams “I don’t trust you.”

Outcomes

Managers who had previously considered hours spent at the desk as a sign of productivity now had that misconception amplified. They were now not only monitoring keyboard stokes and statuses on communication platforms as an indicator of productivity they were using the hours spent at the desk as a measure of performance. This was a massive wake-up call to those managers who could not use outcomes-based performance measures and recognise that it is performance not productivity that is a measure for the knowledge worker. Knowledge workers don’t produce widgets that can be counted. They think for a living. They create, solve problems, innovate, develop new products and services. This inability to competently measure employee performance eroded manager and employee trust.

Empathy

Every employee thrust into working from home, had different challenges, concerns, anxieties, and experiences. They needed support from an empathetic manager who understood their unique challenges and worked them overcome them or deal with them as best they could. They needed support from an empathetic manager who appreciated that the challenges of home schooling and care giving would have an impact on what was previously a well-defined schedule of work. They needed a manager prepared to be flexible and adaptable when it came to work start and end times and the times at which meetings were scheduled.

For many employees there was no empathy and managers treated employees with a one-size-fits-all approach. There was little care or compassion, and trust was eroded.

Crisis of leadership

The global communications firm Edelman have been studying trust for more than 20 years and believe that it is the ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions have with their stakeholders. Edelman’s trust research, the Edelman Trust Barometer, analyses the data they collect and publishes insights that informs leadership, strategy, policy and sustains actions across institutions.

The 2021 trust barometer shows the trust bubble burst in May 2020. Edelman commentary reads:

“With a growing Trust gap and trust declines worldwide, people are looking for leadership and solutions as they reject talking heads who they deem not credible. In fact, none of the societal leaders we track—government leaders, CEOs, journalists and even religious leaders—are trusted to do what is right, with drops in trust scores for all.

In particular, CEO’s credibility is at all-time lows in several countries, including Japan (18 percent) and France (22 percent), making the challenge for CEO leaders even more acute as they try to address today’s problems.”

Out of sight

Employees suddenly lost line of sight of their manager and this led to a feeling of isolation unless management increased check-ins and utilised communication and collaboration platforms to share information and knowledge across teams. Remote employees who were not having regular and frequent contact with their manager felt that they were not being provided with important information and therefore distrusted their manager. Employees wanted to feel that they were told everything they needed to know, and that communication was transparent, open, and honest. Mistrust increased as employees who knew they were suddenly out of sight also felt they were out of mind.

Damage control

Whatever the situation was pre-pandemic, for most organisations the trust between employer and employee has taken a hit. As organisations still grapple with the ongoing transmutation of the COVID-19 virus and how to emerge post-pandemic whenever that may be, the rebuilding of trust must be an intentional priority. Most organisations are in trust damage control due to many reasons including those discussed above.

Organisations must take meaningful action now.

In next weeks newsletter, I will share ways in which you can rebuild trust in your organisation.