4 Steps for Building a High-Trust Company Culture
Trust is among the most essential building blocks in a vibrant company culture. Employees working in a high-trust culture report 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, and 76% more engagement than their colleagues at low-trust companies, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Building a high-trust culture requires some deep soul-searching to find honest answers to what may be sowing distrust in your organization, fixing it, and putting the pieces in place to create a high-trust culture.
Step 1: Evaluation
Before building a high-trust culture, focus on patching cracks in the foundation. Have meaningful one-on-ones with employees and conduct anonymous surveys to understand if there is mistrust in your organization and root out the causes. There are several third-party tools that can be used to evaluate trust in a business if you find systemic issues worth digging into. Sources of mistrust could include:
- Limited communication and transparency
- Minimal opportunity for upward mobility for employees
- Micromanagement
- Lack of employee wellbeing and/or work/life balance programs
- Unclear management expectations
- Interpersonal issues with employees or management
- Frustration with available benefits and salary caps
Once you’ve clearly identified the problems that are creating mistrust, you can fix them and use that solid foundation to do more. Chances are excellent that some of the issues you’ll find in this discovery phase are systemic and will take time to fix, but the rest of the steps can be undertaken while that’s happening.
Step 2: Offer Flexibility
Employees with more flexible schedules have 40% more trust in their employers than those who don’t. A flexible schedule can mean that an employee has expected start and end times, but the start and end times can be flexible based on whether or not the employee is meeting their deliverables. A flex schedule should go beyond doing things like giving parents latitude to pick up their kids from school since all staff may not have children, and those without them would also appreciate flexible working hours.
It can also mean allowing more remote work in specific roles where in-office collaboration is not central to the job. Prodoscore data actually shows that hybrid employees are the most productive, likely because of the freedom they’re given to work when and how it’s best for them. Flexible schedules as a replacement for remote work may be an acceptable compromise for most employees.
Step 3: Increase Transparency
The Center for Women and Enterprise in Boston conducted an investigation into what was creating mistrust in their nonprofit. Transparency was one of the main issues. In the years since, they have implemented several programs to increase transparency, including:
- Clarifying workflows
- Refining job descriptions and responsibilities
- Strengthening operations with a new supervisory role
Solving transparency issues is highly organization-dependent. As a part of your initial survey and discussions for your evaluation, you may want to address how employees envision greater transparency at your organization. One thing that could be applied to most organizations is the adoption of a servant leadership management model, which puts transparency at the center of any employee interaction.
Step 4: Increase Employee Benefits And Salaries Where Possible
As part of your initial exploration, you will probably hear from many employees that they would like more in terms of compensation and benefits. One way to do this without raising base salaries is to implement a transparent and clear bonus structure tied to performance.
Extended health benefits and more paid time off, according to MIT, also raise an employee’s trust because it shows that the business cares about their well-being.
Taking just a couple of these steps to create a high-trust culture puts you well on your way to fixing systemic issues in your business that are decreasing employee engagement and productivity. The benefits of a high-trust culture are too good to ignore for any business that wants to grow, retain employees, and attract top talent.
Do you want to measure your company’s productivity before and after you’ve implemented steps to improve it? You can do that with Prodoscore, our employee productivity monitoring solution that gives you immediate and actionable feedback on what your team is doing without the invasiveness of similar tools.
