We need to improve our trust. We are an organization based on trust. Trust is one of our values. Safe teams are based on trust. These are all claims that happen often in organizations. Many people intuitively realize the importance of trust, and similarly many leadership books and theories require trust to work.
55% of CEOs consider a lack of trust in business a key threat
PwC (2016) Redefining business success in a changing world
It’s one of the soft skills — and yes, let’s reclaim the term — that we need the most for people to work together. And as all soft skills go, by definition, they are hard to measure.
Yet, trust is one of the hardest things to define accurately.
Measuring trust and its impact
Gallup’s take is to use ‘engagement’ as a proxy for ‘trust’. It’s easier to measure, and at a large enough scale it’s possible to get interesting data. They don’t use the word trust, avoiding it almost to an extreme, but it’s obvious that the things they measure are all underpinned by it: employee-leader relationship, employee-employee relationship, employee-customer relationship.
The differentiating factor in this variability is the quality of management, which explains 70% of the variance in team engagement.
J. Harter (2024) World’s Largest Ongoing Study of the Employee Experience
Top-quartile business units achieved 23% higher profit than bottom-quartile units
One of the elements that comes out of it, is that money can’t buy it. So trust, performance, output, as highly important as they are, won’t change by promising bonuses.
Engagement cannot be created through financial incentives.
R. Pendell (2023) Employee Engagement Strategies
The results indicate that the association between salary and job satisfaction is very weak. There is less than 2% overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels
T. Chamorro-Premuzic (2013) Does Money Really Affect Motivation?
Even more, incentives have a negative effect. To be clear: by incentives in this context we mean things like bonuses: if you reach X you’ll get Y, if you are in the high performance bracket you get a an increase. Not base salary or foundational perks.
For every standard deviation increase in reward, intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks decreases by about 25%
T. Chamorro-Premuzic (2013) Does Money Really Affect Motivation?
But back to trust.
Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout.
P. J. Zak (2017) The Neuroscience of Trust
Those working in high-trust companies enjoyed their jobs 60% more, were 70% more aligned with their companies’ purpose, and felt 66% closer to their colleagues
P. J. Zak (2017) The Neuroscience of Trust
While it’s not information directly usable in a workplace, we have found that it’s oxytocin driving social and trust behaviour. And oxytocin lowers with stress and raises with a number of factors.
The eight behaviours to foster trust
The research on oxytocin led P. J. Zak, and further studies, helped identify eight factors that help foster trust in organizations and groups:
- Recognize excellence — make sure for recognition to happen close to the goal achieved, and that’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public. While not everyone might enjoy public recognition tho (check with them) find the right form for each person.
- Assign soft challenges — while a lot of stress is bad, we know from the flow theory that there’s a sweet spot in a challenging yet achievable goal.
- Give people autonomy — it should be obvious nowadays that micromanagement doesn’t work, and yet, here we are. Autonomy is very tightly linked to trust. It’s also important for managers to acknowledge there are many ways to reach a goal. Unless they are mentoring someone, they should let people go and help them keep focused on the end goal.
- Allow teams to self-organize — this is autonomy applied to teams. This is also the parts that embraces diversity and makes it a powerful driver for performance. The team should be able to let people shine in their top skills, creating a mesh where everyone picks the parts of the job that are better for them.
- Embrace transparency — hiding things is intuitively something that leads to distrust, and yet so many organizations have defaults that make documents “locked” and inaccessible. Change protocols, share openly, make everything but personal sensitive data / regulated data open. You all work for the same company, there’s no need for documents to be locked.
- Support socialization — it’s important to be intentional in relationship building. This is true at an individual level, but also organizations can put effort to allow people connect. It’s especially important for remote workers where offices tend to be passive about it because they just “bump” in each other.
- Facilitate growth beyond work — this is a hard one for many people that think that work and personal life should be separate. While this is true in the sense that one should not negatively affect the other, it’s also very myopic of organizations and managers to just care about the person for as long as they stay with the company. Growth is beyond the role and the workplace, and oddly, retention is increased for managers that care more about the people reporting to them.
- Be vulnerable — this is a tough one as lots of old management literature teaches the opposite, but here’s the thing: trust thrives in vulnerability. Only secure people ask for help, only good organizations are safe to allow people to ask for help (and not be marked as “underperforming”). This is anchored on one of the deeper human impulses of cooperation.
These factors represent a more granular take on the self-determination theory by L. Deci from 1970s: autonomy, relatedness, competence, motivation, fears. This is unsurprising, and more importantly it’s excellent cross validation of both approaches.
The trust equation
If you prefer something shorter and easier to apply, and you feel the self-determination theory isn’t specific enough about trust, you can use the trust equation from S. Drozdeck (2003). While not based on the same extensive research as the above behaviours and theory, it’s still a useful shorthand to think and explore good practices.
Credibility is how much the person seems to have the skills and experience to perform the task or support needed. It’s a pretty simple criteria, but sometimes people with the right skills can get stuck here as they might not be perceived as having these skills. The action-perception gap also usually grow larger in bigger organizations, as well as remote organization. For credibility it’s not just a matter of doing the work, but being seen doing the work. This is because trust is a relational dimension, not a transactional one. This links to ‘competence’ in the self-determination theory.
Reliability is the connection between saying something and completing it. Sometimes people think this means 100% success rate, but that’s not the case: raising a blocker or an issue with the team or the manager is also part of reliability. Adjusting and adapting is too. It’s also often underestimated how it’s a two part things: a manager that doesn’t set clear expectations and tasks is an issue as much as someone not being reliable in completing it. Reliability is impossible if the people aren’t aligned. Reliability is also not always the “big” things. If someone always completes the big tasks (i.e. the big quarterly project has been completed), but keeps dropping the smaller ones (i.e. they forgot to update the title of that guideline you briefly discussed), it might not have an impact on the overall productivity, but they certainly will not be seen as someone that can be counted on. This links to ‘autonomy’ in the self-determination theory.
Authenticity is probably the most nebulous, but also something that people can pick on intuitively and often unconsciously. It’s also often confused with the misleading idea of “bring your whole self to work” (a risk for many minorities). This variable is about being aligned with oneself, showing a personality that is consistent between work and socialization, being transparent in their actions, etc. This links to ‘relatedness’ in the self-determination theory.
Self-interest is a peculiar variable as it’s meant to express how the actions of an individual are done for the common good or for personal gain. In short: selfishness. There’s no trust possible if the suspicion of self-interest makes its way between two people.
Mind that all these variables aren’t absolute judgements for the people involved, they are all about perception. It’s not a matter of being credible, being reliable, being authentic, or being self-interested. It’s how others perceive that trait. One could be doing all of these traits in an exemplar way, but if they aren’t perceived as such by others, all is in vain and it’s effectively as if they are not.
As it’s often said, it’s also harder to gain trust than to lose it. Losing it in some situations can take a moment, but re-gaining after such event takes much more effort. The thought of the betrayal will likely linger in people minds for long, and that leads to diverging interpretations when things are in the gray area. And most things are there. For example, forgetting to reply in time in a high-trust relationship is likely to be forgotten quickly and in practice lead to a reminder; but forgetting to reply in a low-trust relationship validates the patterns and likely won’t get a reminder, with the person instead doing it themselves.