Building Employee Trust
Trust is complicated. It’s hard to build, but very easy to destroy. And, when it comes to employees, it can make or break your business. Your team may love their work and their colleagues, but distrust of leaders can make it very difficult for them to be fulfilled.
One of the worst job experiences I’ve ever had was when I worked at the local public library. I was the IT Manager, and it was my responsibility to ensure that all the library computer systems functioned properly. I worked there for several years, and I never felt that the Library Director trusted me to do my job. To be fair, I didn’t trust him either.
Every day felt like I had to justify my existence to the heads of other departments. To make matters worse, he would come into my office and explain to me that other departments were questioning how much work I was getting done. Eventually, after several of these visits, the Director gave me a thin-ruled piece of paper and asked that I track my tasks throughout the day in fifteen minute increments.
The goal, ostensibly, was to make sure that I wasn’t wasting time. Unfortunately, it took me several minutes out of every fifteen minute chunk to complete the paperwork; I had to write down who I was helping, what their issues were, how long I had been doing it, etc. It was time consuming, annoying, and left no ambiguity about whether or not the Director trusted me.
I began to use the “task list” paper to pad my time. After all, I was spending nearly as much time filling out the thing as I did anything else. I felt micromanaged and completely unmotivated, and at the end of the day, I didn’t trust the Director. I didn’t trust him to follow through. I didn’t trust him to have my best interests at heart. And I didn’t trust him not to change things on me at the last minute.
Do What You Say You’re Going to Do
This may seem self-explanatory, but you’d be surprised how many managers and leaders don’t follow through. The Library Director made many promises to me about what he was going to do for the technology department: getting new machines, upgrading software, or helping other departments understand what my role was. While it was frustrating to be rebuffed on the first two items, the fact that he couldn’t help me explain my role to anyone else was what eventually drove me to find another job. An employee can’t trust you if you consistently fail to follow through.
Even well-meaning leaders can over-promise and under-deliver. We’ve been guilty of this in various areas of our business over the years, sometimes because context changes and sometimes because we completely forget. When there is a change in context, and you are unable to follow through, you should let your team know as soon as possible. They may still be frustrated that you’re not doing what you said, but giving them more warning is always better. Forgetting to follow through is worse, because it’s not something out of your control. It shows a lack of respect for your team, and it’s a great way to erode trust. I’d be lying if I said that we’ve never forgotten to do something we promised to take care of.
Following through is one of the most important things you can do as a leader. If you want to build trust, it’s where you have to start.
Make Their Lives Better
If you want employees to trust you, you have to have their best interests at heart, and they have to know that. A good way to show this is by helping make their lives better.
About a year and a half ago, the pandemic forced most office-based businesses to allow their employees to work from home. For many employees, this change offered them unprecedented levels of freedom. For employees dealing with children or caring for family members with special needs, working from home allowed them to be more involved in both home and work. (If you haven’t read it already, James wrote a really good article about work life balance.)
Letting employees work from home also explicitly told them that they were trusted.
As more and more businesses reopen co-located offices, and in some cases force their workforce to return in-person, many employees are wondering why they need to return to the office environment to do their work. They’ve found that working from home allows them to fit work around their life and not the other way around. All too often the only way that managers know employees are working is whether or not they’re in the office. Forcing everyone to return to an in-person office sends a signal that employees aren’t trusted to do their work anywhere else.
Work from home is a big example of Making Their Lives Better, but there are probably dozens of things you could implement right now to improve the quality of life for your employees. Making those decisions and changes will help grow your employee’s trust.
Don’t Change Things Too Often
For years in our company we used the phrase Everything Changes Monday to describe the results of our leadership having big meetings, going to a conference, or reading a new business book. Initially, we thought of Everything Changes Monday as a good thing. We were scrappy, agile, and not stuck in one place. We made changes much too quickly and didn’t give anyone the chance to get comfortable before we decided to change something else.
The toll that the pace of change took on the team was a very real one. Rather than feeling like we were an agile, scrappy start-up, most of our team felt like our business was being run by the whims of leadership; we seemed to change direction as quickly as the wind. It didn’t matter if the leadership had spent months working through and planning, the pace of change we had introduced made every change seem rushed.
Your team needs space to understand their work and their context. If you change things too frequently, even if those changes are well thought-out, your team won’t feel comfortable. What if they get too used to something, only to have you change it on them later? That’s not to say that you shouldn’t make changes, but you should communicate them to your team well in advance, and it shouldn’t happen on a weekly basis. We’ve made enough mistakes in this area that “introducing change to your team” may be a future post.
How do you build trust with your teams? Do you have any tricks or tips? We’d love to hear them in the comments.