Establishing a company culture built on trust will be foundational to your current and ongoing success. Whether you are in the office, juggling a hybrid working model or entirely remote, ensuring your organization prioritizes and projects trust will directly influence the happiness of your teams, the satisfaction of your customers and the quality of your outputs.
Our Learn2 team has spent decades working with some truly incredible brands who have recognized the importance of trust but struggled to interweave it throughout every aspect of their operations. We are here to support organizations to see the value of a trust-based company culture and create new or evolve current models to achieve it.
Why Trust in the Workplace Matters
Trust is the foundation of every successful relationship. Be it a personal or professional partnership, without trust, there is very little to hold a collaboration together. Trust in the workplace creates a sense of safety. When you trust your team members and they extend that same courtesy to you, both parties will be more willing to take creative leaps, exercise accountability and self-govern towards more positive and productive ends.
A corporate culture built on trust empowers everyone to save time and energy. By eradicating the need for double and triple checking on one another, each team member will be able to exercise and extend their individual gifts, applying them towards a shared goal.
How to Build Trust in the Workplace
1. Welcome Feedback & Do Something With It
Creating and sustaining a company culture built on trust requires involving the people you work with in the process. Organizational culture cannot be created in isolation, or it will not stand the test of time. An authentic way to bring your employees onboard and ensure a sense of mutual respect is to actively solicit their feedback.
Whether it’s about the annual company celebration, approaches to the strategic vision or policies and partnerships, asking your team members to provide suggestions – and actually leveraging them – will show a flexibility, humility and respect that generates two-way trust.
2. Celebrate Employee Achievements
To feel trusted and thereby imbue trust in another person or institution, team members need to feel seen. A quick way to destabilize a corporate culture built on trust is to only address your team members when their actions do not align with your expectations. By recognizing exceptional work and progress, you will show your team members you care for them as individuals, not just cogs in a machine. Plus, they will come to look forward to – rather than fear – directives and communications from leadership.
3. Empower Team Members Through Delegation
Your company needs to achieve certain objectives and adhere to overarching values. But, the accomplishment of this does not require that team members continuously forgo their individuality to emulate the exact working style and way of doing things as modeled by their team leaders.
We are not suggesting you let your team members run amok with their duties. However, one way to build trust is to provide parameters while giving team members the freedom to add in their personal flare. This approach takes the micro out of management. It also lets your team members know you believe in their abilities and trust in them to get the job done – and done well.
4. Create A Culture of Two-Way Communication
We all know what it’s like to have a conversation with someone who is not listening, but rather just waiting (impatiently) for their turn to talk. Active and attentive communication is not only important when building one-to-one relationships, but it’s also essential for contributing to an organizational culture built on trust, and can be developed through team activities like communication skills training. By taking the time to listen to your team members and showing genuine interest in their contributions, they will return the courtesy ten-fold by showing up with enthusiasm and excellence each and every day.
5. Invest in Your Team Members’ Development
Investing in your team members’ professional development and well-being shows you care about them as whole people – not just employees passing through. You can nurture their interests and skills through development training and provide support for their mental, emotional and physical well-being. By demonstrating genuine care and compassion for the people you work with, you will earn their trust and felty. Not to mention, happy people are more successful and more likely to stick around.
6. Allow Yourself – And Others – To Be Human
“Perfect” bosses who never fail and never show even a glimmer of the person behind the professional make for an extremely rigid workplace. This stark separation between the personal and professional will inhibit the formation of trust by rendering your leadership team inaccessible and disallowing your team members from feeling like they can be their true selves. By asking for help when you need it, being authentic about where you are at and where you need to go, you will display a likeable vulnerability that will create safe spaces for others to flourish within.
Build Workplace Trust with Learn2
Building and maintaining trust takes work. It can also require an outside perspective that identifies and articulates areas where you can build upon what’s already there and build anew what hasn’t yet been established. Our Learn2 professional development specialists have worked with organizational leaders of every persuasion to build company cultures based on trust. We create bridges and repair systems in meaningful and authentic ways.
Our Learn2 coaches look forward to supporting your team top to bottom – and vice versa – to engage in pivotal conversations and programming that contributes to a strong, long-lasting foundation of trust. Reach out to our team today and we will create a custom plan that addresses your organization’s unique environment and opportunities. Together, we will achieve short- and long-term transformation, all with the power of trust.
