The value of employee trust? It’s worth it!

Business leaders and HR are on tight budgets and have targets to hit. It’s impossible to jump on each new ‘hot topic’ in the market. It’s impossible to purchase every service and tool that are offered by enterprise sales reps from the next SaaS company. Ever had complaints from your employees about “yet another tool”, or “yet another training”? Besides, you can’t do that to your procurement department. And frankly, there are costs related to every purchase: it is your task to grow, not to go bankrupt.

The case for the introduction of a new topic into your organisation has to be strong. The main question to answer: Will it move the needle?

Trust will move the needle

Even though it’s often seen as an elusive topic, there are hard numbers that back up the importance of trust. Trust is present in every human interaction where we are trying to achieve an outcome, but are unable to control it:

Trust is the confidence in someone’s or something’s ability and intention to perform an action that will lead to value creation, without being able to control or enforce the action or the outcome. – Timen Baart, CEO TrustXP

Your employees are getting out of bed each morning to pursue a goal. That goal is generally a combination of the following:

  • Money to provide for X
  • Career progression and status
  • Working on cool stuff, with cool technologies (work is fun)
  • Being part of something bigger (including being with people you like)

Besides the work contract that they have with your company, through which they exchange time for a salary, these additional objectives are important. And that is where trust comes in; your employees need to trust that their goals can be met by working at your organisation.

Why you should care about employee trust; the numbers

When employees are trusting that the organisation provides them with (access to) their goal, they give so much back. Because employee trust is the root cause for employees to be engaged. (Employee engagement in itself is a lagging indicator, so why bother? But that’s for another blog.) What your employees give back makes the decision to focus on employee trust a little easier for business leaders. Rephrase: It makes employee trust a top-priority.

  • High-trust organisations outperform the average annual revenue growth of their competition with 5% (6.72 vs. 11.66%), according to FTSE Russel
  • High-trust organisations are 11 times more likely to innovate, as stated in the HOW report
  • Gallup, pioneers in Employee Engagement, concluded higher profitability (+22%), productivity (+21%), customer ratings (+10%), absenteeism(-37%) and employee turnover (-25% to -65%) to be directly related to engagement, as well as fewer safety incidents (-48%) and quality defects (-41%)

To start with improving employee trust, you will first have to figure out what your current status is. Is your organisation trusted by your employees? Ask around and start measuring. Identify the area’s of opportunity, and start doing something about it.

It isn’t hard to improve trust. It does require your commitment. If you could use a helping hand, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to assist you every step of the way.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

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