systematicHR

Do your employees trust you? More importantly, do your employees trust your boss? Even better, do your employees trust your executive team?

What goes into trust and why is it important? Trust is critical at a couple of levels. First, trust for the executive team is crucial. The belief in integrity by the executive team translates fairly directly to the integrity of the organization as a whole. Putting it simply, workers want to work for an organization that is doing something worthwhile and doing it in a way that is generally positive. If there is a belief that the executive team lacks integrity, this directly affects their ability to steer the organization in the right direction. This idea is central to both external and employer brands, and what must be understood is that a sub-par employer brand will definitely affect your ability to attract and retain people.

A lesser hurdle is whether your employees trust you. Your employees simply want to know that you’re looking out for them. This might mean that you’re trying to help them grow, look for that next job, get them more money if needed, or it might just mean that you can explain your actions. When you didn’t get them that next job, providing clear and thoughtful feedback and rationale will get them to respect your decisions. They might hate it, but at least they’ll respect it.

While it’s possible to have employees trust you but not the executive team (or vice versa), it’s virtually impossible to engage most employees without a combination of both these factors. Employees need a combination of growth expectations (of which you as a manager play a direct role in) and the confidence that their organization is the right place to do that growth (of which the executive team plays ad direct role in). If you lack trust, you will always lack employee engagement.

What goes into trust? Simply put its transparency and the ability to put your brand statements into action. Perhaps for the first time ever, I’ll quote SHRM:

“To a large extent, people fail to recognize that it is not our values and beliefs that build trust,” says Reina, who also is the co-founder of Stowe, Vt.-based consulting firm Chagnon & Reina Associates Inc. “The only thing that builds trust is the way that we behave.” Thus, once an organization identifies its core values, it must take additional steps to ensure that those values are reflected in the words and actions of senior executives—especially when dealing with issues of employee well-being. Distilled from the insights of a variety of experts, the following five steps—all of which can be bolstered with the aid of HR’s expertise—can help foster employee trust:

• Translating corporate values into behaviors, and training all employees on those behaviors.
• Ensuring that leaders behave consistently with core values.
• Ensuring that leaders communicate in ways that support core values.
• Ensuring that employees feel they are involved in decisions.
• Measuring employee perceptions of their leaders’ integrity. ((Krell, Eric, June 2006. “Do They Trust You?” HR Magazine, SHRM.))