Top Ten Tips for... Building Trust in Your Organisation
In any successful organisation, trust is absolutely vital. Higher levels of trust lead to better individual, team and company performance. If you build trust and encourage it to grow it leads to more people working together, improved employee engagement, better problem solving and a more positive working environment. Sounds great, but how do you achieve it? Here are our top ten tips for building trust in your organisation:
1. Encourage multilateral communication
Encourage multilateral communication and dialogue among peers and between employees and leaders. Move away from a hierarchy model towards a community. If you give people a shared sense of ownership in company goals and mission you will enhance their position, significance and purpose which all help to build trust.
2. Be consistent
Predictability is one of the four pillars of trust and consistency is the key to ensuring predictability. People trust what they know and what they expect. Challenge and encourage business leaders to communicate consistently by always being open and honest.
3. Encourage feedback and listen to it
Developing ways for employees’ voices to be heard ensures there is effective two-way communication between the leaders and all other employees. If employees see their views are being listened to, as well as acted upon, they are far more likely to trust their leaders and accept the direction the organisation is going in. Providing ongoing and useful feedback also ensures that people never wonder where they stand. That’s important because uncertainty feeds fear and fear erodes trust.
4. Communicate regularly, face-to-face
Your people will lose focus and trust if they don’t have regular and consistent information. Whether you are communicating a strategy, launching a new product or driving behavioural change, you need to communicate your intentions clearly and consistently. Research proves that employees dislike overuse of electronic communication and consider face-to-face communication to be more engaging, authentic and trustworthy. Introducing face-to-face communication is one of the most important initiatives for building trust.
5. Lead by example
Work hard to become a trusted adviser to your business leaders and managers – you need their trust so that you can convince them they need to earn employees’ trust. Start small, perhaps with regional/divisional managers and directors to gain confidence and advocates along the way.
6. Turn ‘not knowing’ to your advantage
People won’t trust a know-it-all. Good leaders can help build organisational trust by recognising that they don’t have all the answers, and by consulting with colleagues who enjoy honest discussion and debate. Nothing builds trust more effectively than a manager admitting that they don’t know and promising to find out the answer so that everyone is kept informed.
7. Stay true to your values even in difficult circumstances
There’s a lot more to trustworthiness than telling the literal truth or relying on legalistic loopholes. It’s easy to be candid, sincere and truthful when everything is going well, but what about when you have to deliver hard news or admit mistakes? That’s when trust and leadership are put to the test. Don’t risk losing trust by trying to cover up when things get tough.
8. Encourage mutual respect
Respecting every individual in your team is an important step towards gaining their trust. How can you expect trust and respect from others if you don’t practice it yourselves? Nobody will trust you until you earn their respect. But once you have it, building trust becomes significantly easier.
9. Accept disagreement
When differences in opinion arise, an open discussion is the best way to solve a problem. Trying to get a ‘false’ agreement from people is a recipe for disaster in terms of building ongoing trust. Explore new ways of doing things with the intention to solve the problems. The fact that there are disagreements is actually encouraging – it shows that the team trusts you and is not afraid to tell you the truth.
10. Benchmark trust and measure progress
It could be useful to establish a formal system of trust measurement in your organisation. One way of doing this would be to introduce an annual employee survey that measures and benchmarks trust, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for this. Discuss possible options as a team across the organisation to make sure you end up with a solution that is right for your company.
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