With remote working now a reality for organisations, trust has never been more important. From experience and research, we know that high employee engagement leads to positive results for both organisations and staff in terms of growing the profitability of the business and increasing the bottom line.
When you build a culture of trust, your employees will:
- Be more productive
- Have a more positive attitude
- Collaborate better
- Have reduced stress levels
- Give more back
All this will mean that attrition will be reduced and employees will stay with their employers longer – saving significant costs on recruitment and training.
Understanding trust
So, why haven’t companies put more effort into ensuring they have a culture of trust?
Likely, because they don’t know how: and to understand how to facilitate trust, you must first understand what makes people trust others.
So, how can we build trust:
The need to recognise staff and encourage employees to do the same
Employee recognition has a significant impact on engagement, motivation, satisfaction, and productivity. It also directly correlates to how much staff trust their management team.
Recognition has the most significant impact on trust when:
- It’s given as soon as a goal has been achieved
- It’s awarded from your peers
- It’s personal and public
Finding the right way to recognise your employees depends on the type of organisation and individual. There are a variety of ways to publicly recognise employees, but with today’s massive shift to remote working, a social intranet provides organisations with an excellent place to recognise and thank staff. This can be achieved in many ways including sharing promotions and success stories, introducing a peer-led recognition scheme, rewarding outstanding performance, undertaking internal value-led competitions and promoting a culture of innovation within the business.
Always assign challenging but achievable tasks
Obviously, an unattainable goal will cause people to give up before they even start. Team tasks work well as when challenged to work together to reach a common goal, the brain responds. In Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Ideas he shares the principles of creating diverse teams and bringing people with different backgrounds, positions and experiences together to gain a wider view on a challenge. Collaborative working brings more brains to a challenge and is likely to achieve better results.
To facilitate trust, introduce key milestones for the project, check-in frequently, and adjust goals when necessary.
Always let employees work how they want to work.
Give employees the freedom to manage people and do their work in a way that is best for them. Being trusted to figure things out on your own is a great motivator. Not only does this foster trust, but autonomy also promotes innovation. You will find that if you give individuals a task independently they will try a different approach.
Treat employees like adults and base their work performance on results not time spent. By enforcing a strict 9-5 culture you can often miss employees most productive times. By judging on outputs and agreeing timescales for project completion you provide a more flexible working environment which pays dividends in both morale and productivity. When managing my designers, we’d agree the key tasks to be completed within the day and week and then entrust them with managing their time to do so. Some preferred to start and finish later, whilst others worked better early in the morning and got to leave earlier when their projects had been done. Others would take time out during the day to get some fresh air and think about the project rather than sit in the office staring at a blank screen. By giving them this freedom, the performance was significantly improved and a happy team equated to happy clients.
Always enable employees to work on their projects
When an employee is passionate about a task, they will likely approach it with more enthusiasm than something they are disinterested in. Enabling employees to work on tasks they care about will ultimately be more rewarding.
Staff can quickly become disengaged if they are working on something they’ve been doing for a long time, so trusting them to work on what they like and giving them space and opportunity to go above and beyond will ultimately give them greater trust in you.
You must be open and honest about company information.
When employees are uncertain about where their company is headed, it can cause stress. This, in turn, reduces their trust in the company. Ongoing communication and openness is the key to combat this unrest.
Make your management team an example of great leadership with their communication, whether it be a significant event, change, or merely an update to the current direction or status of the business. Using a mixture of channels to communicate will also meet employees different learning styles, a combination of video calls, emails and printed communication such as leaflets and newsletters provide a good balance of touchpoints for all staff to feel informed and updated
Your workforce will be grateful for the reassurance, authority, and accountability offered by your senior leadership team providing regular updates. Especially in today’s pandemic, your staff need to hear from your management team continually if they are going to build trust and loyalty towards them.
The need to encourage relationship building
It comes as no surprise that we as humans are social creatures, and the more trust we have, the more social we are. This holds true in the workplace as well. Studies have shown that when individuals build relationships and social ties at work, their overall performance and productivity improves.
Team building activities, happy hours, and sponsored lunches all help to facilitate relationships between staff. Even in these unique circumstances, there are ways to utilise the digital workplace and connect with our work colleagues on a social level.
Digital workplace features like team spaces, blogs, forums, video conferencing, chats, and recognition features all allow remote or dispersed employees to build relationships with others, regardless of location.
You must facilitate personal and professional growth
Companies with high-trust ratings adopt a growth mindset when developing their teams. They ensure their employees have the tools and resources they need to grow into their next role and meet their personal goals.
When an employee sees their manager and workplace care not only about company goals but their own ambitions as an individual, they are more likely to trust and work harder to support their company.
Give them support to acquire new work skills, set clear goals, give employees the autonomy to reach them, and promote work-life balance.
During this pandemic, the key thing to note is that every action counts. With this in mind, trust has to be a focus point of the business and its operations.
To find out how we can help: www.yourteamwellbeing.com or contact me at Hayley@gainmomentum.marketing/ 07841 054167.
