Why trust is both fundamental and delicate in the workplace

Employees working at high-trust companies are 50% more productive, 76% more engaged, and take 13% fewer sick days. However, the truth is that many companies aren’t places of trust for their employees. In fact, around 1 in 5 workers don’t trust their employer and 58% of them say they would actually trust a complete stranger over their superior. So, why does trust play such a pivotal role within the workplace, and why are companies failing to build it?

“Trust is fundamental to all human relationships and an organization is just a web of human relationships,” says Anne Morriss, author and expert on trust. Morriss and her colleague Frances Frei have worked extensively with American corporations, diagnosing and remedying issues of trust within the workplace – including Uber at the height of its 2017 leadership crisis. Morriss explains that trust is vital within an organization because, without it, workers find themselves unwilling to be guided by their leaders. This is because leading is a “relational practice” between manager and employee, so when trust is lacking, it ultimately doesn’t work. “Trust is really the foundation of all organizations,” Morriss says.

Likewise, trust also plays a crucial role in creativity, innovation, and productivity. Jaime Taets, CEO of Keystone Group International, explains this is due to how trust underpins “psychological safety.”

Safety to propose and innovate

“To be productive and high performing, you need to be in a psychologically safe place to be able to fail,” Taets says. This means that if employees can freely make mistakes or make a wrong decision, they will ultimately be more willing to propose and try new things. This in turn leads to greater innovation and better business results.

Morriss echoes this point, saying that “psychological safety allows us to come together and discuss the undiscussable.” This is particularly important when it comes to working with diverse teams. “When groups of humans come together, we’re drawn towards the things we have in common,” says Morriss. “This is called the Common Information Effect. But, what we really want are those unique ideas and perspectives.” However, this requires a certain level of trust as a person has to fall back on the things that make them different from the group, which implies risk – both personally and professionally. “In the absence of trust, you can maintain the status quo, but you can’t make significant progress.”

To this end, Taets concludes that trust is ultimately crucial for fostering a “growth mindset” within companies. This is to say that when workers know that it’s okay to innovate and fail, they will stick their necks out and propose new ways of doing things. This is opposed to a “fixed mindset”, which places excessive importance on knowledge and expertise, which causes workers to always play it safe as they never feel knowledgeable or smart enough to take a certain risk.

Detecting a lack of trust

So, if trust is so deeply engrained within a company and so crucial for performance and productivity, how can we detect if our place of work is lacking in trust?

“Speed is one big tell,” says Morriss, who explains that when trust starts to deteriorate, the speed of progress slows down. This can apply to everything within the organization all the way from decision-making to teamwork. “You’ll see that everything’s moving more slowly before you start seeing it in traditional performance metrics such as profitability and productivity.”

Taets agrees, noting that companies will tend to see a clear reduction in teams collaborating together and knowledge being shared. “Silos get put up because there’s a lot of protectionism due to not trusting others and the fear of losing credibility.” Similarly, you may also find that there is a lot more emailing and messaging back and forth as people try to cover their backs.

Likewise, another key indicator of trust for Taet is measuring the amount of positive conflict and healthy debate within group meetings. “If a worker can’t come in, give an opposing view, hash out something even better, then have a beer with their colleague at the end of it, there’s no high-trust environment.”

Where’s the wobble?

We often like to think of building or even rebuilding trust as a long process. However, as Morriss explains, it can actually happen “astonishingly quickly” as long as people are put at the center of the problem. Morriss believes that when companies are suffering, they have to “pop the hood on trust” and figure out where and how it’s breaking down. This also means looking at the three drivers of trust: authenticity, empathy, and logic. This is to say that companies have to work out which of these three pillars has become shaky – or, as Morriss describes it, “is having a wobble.”

Only when companies identify which pillar has become “wobbly” can they start to address the issue. However, Morriss is quick to explain that many companies often try to fix trust by doubling down on the wrong pillars. “You can’t solve a logic problem by doubling down on empathy.”

She illustrates this with the hypothetical example of a Gen-Z worker who arrives at a company and brazenly asks when they will be promoted, and what the pathway to that promotion looks like. Certain managers will ignore the question, potentially think it’s obnoxious, and respond by giving additional yoga classes at lunch. Morriss points out that here the Gen-Z worker is asking for a core work need to be met: a logic request. However, the organization is responding with an empathetic solution. “We see this disconnect all the time.”

In the case of Uber, Morriss and Frei found that it had a “wobble on empathy” across the company. For example, drivers couldn’t make a good living, certain employees felt less valued compared with other employees, etc. So, Uber started running a series of experiments to start rebuilding trust. “For example, with drivers looking to make a living wage, they introduced the tipping function, which changed the economics of that role,” Morriss says.

Morriss ultimately believes that rebuilding trust is about “popping the hood” and “responding to a trust problem with the urgency that people are feeling it.” She says that if workers see you responding to it, they will give you the time and space to get it right. “The antidote is action. Just seeing an organization responding to an unmet need, that’s where the spark of trust starts.”

Barriers to building trust

The reality, though, is that there are many barriers preventing companies from even taking the first steps toward remedying the issue. For example, despite how quickly trust can be restored, it is ironically time that proves to be a major barrier. “Leaders just don’t have the time to build trust,” Taets says. Likewise, companies often aren’t investing enough in their leaders and managers to give them the tools and training to navigate the fast-paced and ever-changing world we work in.

In this sense, there is also a generational component. Taets points to the fact that older generations have difficulty showing vulnerability. “Older managers don’t have the trust in themselves to say, ‘I don’t know.’” Baby Boomers can also look down on younger generations believing themselves to have far superior experience and knowledge. “We’re not learning from each other,” says Taets.

To illustrate this, Taets describes a situation where her consultancy, while working with a company, discovered a 26-year-old engineer who had worked out a way of shortening a reporting process from six hours down to 30 minutes. However, he hadn’t told anybody because he was at the bottom of the rung in the organization. Once again, a lack of trust had slowed down the speed at which a company could potentially operate.

“Leaders need to recognize those younger workers. They need to send them into every single team in the entire organization because that’s going to produce business results and that worker is going to be happiest,” says Taets. She believes this is the performance and trust dynamics currently missing in many companies. “It’s about giving younger employees the trust to be able to effect change. Yes, they may screw up or not do things the way we do, but they may be able to do it all more efficiently.”

New obstacles on the horizon

What’s more, with the rise of AI, trust is being undermined by a unique set of challenges, which companies are having to address. According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, 46% of workers currently fear losing their jobs to automation (up 4% from 2022). AI is therefore undoubtedly sowing the seeds of distrust within organizations. However, for Morriss, maintaining trust will ultimately depend on how companies integrate AI into job design and how they frame the conversation around it.

For example, a boss could approach a copywriter and say: “We have this great AI tool, which we think will automate mundane tasks, so you have more time to be creative and make an even greater contribution to the company.” Or, the copywriter could simply turn up to work one day and find that their team of five is now a team of three and that they could be next out the door.

“Organizations need a really clear story about how they will be using AI to benefit their employees and customers to advance the mission of the organization,” says Morriss. This can also simply be a company admitting that they’re unsure about AI and still working things out. It’s ultimately important for employees to be part of navigating and implementing the revolution. “We really need to be having micro-level conversations, so that this revolution isn’t just happening to employees, but they’re also an active part of it.”

Photo: Welcome to the Jungle

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