Establishing and maintaining trust within an organization is like setting the foundation for a sturdy building—without it, everything else is at risk of crumbling. Trust isn’t just a feel-good concept; it’s a critical component that drives collaboration, innovation, and overall success. When trust is strong, teams are more cohesive, communication flows more freely, and problems are solved more effectively.
Additionally, a study published by researcher and author of Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies, Paul J. Zak, found that compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report:
- 74% less stress
- 106% more energy at work
- 29% more satisfaction
- 50% higher productivity
- 40% less burnout
- 13% fewer sick days
- 76% more engagement
We’ve established that there is tangible data that highlights the importance of fostering trust within the workplace, but how is it done? How can HR professionals and leadership build trust among team members within their organization? Continue reading to find out.
How to Build Trust in Your Organization
When understanding and explaining trust, our HRG consultants often rely on Frances Frei and the concepts shared in her TED Talk, “How to Build and Rebuild Trust.” Frei’s expertise offers a roadmap for transforming organizational dynamics and creating an environment where trust isn’t just hoped for, but actively built and sustained.
Frei describes trust as having three critical components: authenticity, empathy, and logic. If all three components are executed well, trust can be cultivated and sustained. However, when one of these pillars “wobble” or falter, trust is likely to be lost and difficult to restore. To form a better understanding of the three components of trust, we’ll dive deeper into each pillar, exploring what they entail, how they are constructed, and how they are maintained.
Authenticity
The article, “The Importance of Authenticity,” from Berkeley ExecEd defines authenticity as “knowing what’s important to you and remaining true to these values in the face of external pressures and expectations to think and behave a certain way.” Our team at HRG couldn’t agree more with this definition as it is easily adaptable to evaluating authenticity within an organization. Does your organization have expressed values that are understood and truly felt by all types of people in your organization? Do organizational decisions and behaviors reflect those values? Does the organization stay true to its values when faced with external pressures or adversity?
Though authenticity is a critical pillar of building and maintaining trust within an organization, it is the easiest of the three to wobble because inauthenticity can be quickly spotted by those within an organization. Inauthentic organizations lack a connected set of values and behaviors; said another way, their values don’t align with their culture. When team members within an organization notice this, they often become discouraged or disillusioned with the organization – leading to burnout, low engagement, poor performance, and ultimately high turnover.
Organizations can develop and maintain strong authenticity by clearly defining their values, aligning them with policies and procedures, coaching leadership on how to uphold them, and incorporating them into various tools such as the employee handbook and onboarding process.
Empathy
Most team members and leaders are fully capable of being empathetic, but unfortunately, demanding goals and hectic schedules can cause them to prioritize tasks over meaningful interactions. Although they have good intentions, focusing on the daily demands of their position can cause them to seem cold and callous. A wobble in empathy is often why we often see organizations that are in fast-paced, competitive, or demanding industries struggle to build trust within their organization.
HRG often partners with organization leaders to build empathetic communication and action within their teams. Our consultants start by identifying situations where leaders may be distracted, then they recommend tools that allow those leaders to consciously focus on being present and empathetic. Simple actions such as validating employee’s feelings and opinions are the foundation of building empathy, and thus, enhancing trust.
Logic
Frei describes logic as the rigor of one’s ideas and their ability to deliver on them. Trust is at risk of dissolving if team members don’t have confidence in their colleagues’ logic, their leadership’s logic, or the organization’s logic. She explains a wobble in logic can be attributed to one of two reasons: There is either a flaw in the logic, or the logic of decisions are not being communicated clearly. Frei notes that the latter is often the culprit of a lack of confidence in one’s logic.
Fortunately, leadership training and professional development can help team members and leadership improve their ability to communicate their logic when explaining decisions or presenting ideas to others. This often involves training on concise, fact-based communication that incorporates the use of empathy and critical thinking.
If there is a logic wobble at an organization level, HRG encourages organizations to root decisions in data and evidence as well as to acknowledge operational failures within the organization. Our HRG consultants emphasize the importance of owning up to mistakes by communicating with employees when changes don’t go well. Ownership of mistakes combined with creating and implementing solutions that involve input from all parties boosts team member confidence in the organization while tying in the other components of trust – empathy and authenticity.
HRG Challenges You to Evaluate Trust in Your Organization
At times, leadership or HR staff can spot the absence of trust within their organization because it is extremely apparent, but in many cases, a lack of trust across the organization or between specific team members can be difficult to notice. If your organization is experiencing consistent troubles such as high turnover, low engagement or participation, low productivity, or frequent conflicts, then you might have an underlying trust problem. Whether you know there is a lack of trust in your organization, or you are seeing the above mentioned signs of an unidentified trust issue, we encourage you to start speaking with team members to see if there has been a breakdown in trust. If you would like to learn more about how HRG can help your organization restore and maintain trust for better engagement and productivity, please click here or contact us.