Trust

A pillar of High Performance and Wellbeing in the workplace.

On this page

This page is the doorway to a large topic that we explore across many other pages.  There are links to these pages throughout this page.

Introduction

Research consistently shows that it’s clear, creating an employee-centric culture can be good for business. But how do you do that effectively? Culture is typically designed in an ad hoc way around random perks, socials and events. While such efforts might boost workplace happiness in the short term, they fail to have any lasting effect on talent retention or performance.

Research* has found that building a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organisations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.

*Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies (Paul J. Zak)

What is Trust? What does it mean to trust someone?

This is often an overlooked aspect of creating high trust working environments.  It's much easier to consider whether you have trust in different aspects of a person or of a group.  Consider how much trust you have in someone's ability, attitude and intentions separately.  This is really important because someone may have gained your trust by demonstrating that they are able to do a specific thing very well.  But can you trust them to excel in a different type of task?  This aspect of Trust starts to cross over with  Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership model.

Building trust

Trust is a vast subject.  At VFS, we look for every opportunity to help our clients operate and behave in ways that build trust.  Trust needs to be valued and championed by senior leaders and it needs to be nurtured in every corner of the organisation. 

But,  building a high-trust culture isn't the end game.  It's a means to an end... to enable conflict and debate to be constructive; to keep morale high; to increase transparency; to help people learn safely from their mistakes (and from others mistakes); increase levels of empowerment and autonomy... and ultimately for better decisions to be made, more effective work to be done and in more efficient ways.

So ensure you fully utilise the high trust once you have it!

VFS Services all contribute to building a high-trust workplace.

Research into the Neuroscience of Trust (which also contains an 8 point approach to building trust) confirms what we all know, you cultivate trust by setting a clear direction, giving people what they need to see it through, and getting out of their way.  Leaders in high-trust workplaces ask for help from colleagues instead of just telling them to do things. Research found that this stimulates oxytocin production in others, increasing their trust and cooperation.

It’s not about being easy on your employees or expecting less from them. High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults.  Our VFS 4A framework has been shown to consistently create high-trust, high performing workforces.

Increase Trust with these practices:

Clarifying Predictive Trust versus Vulnerability-based Trust

What Next?

What can you do to establish and grow trust in your relationships?


Things you can do to build trust today:


Areas your VFS Consultant can help you:

VFS Personal Agility Programme - Trust-related aspects:

see VFS Personal Agility Programme

These are the topics we cover in our programme to help teams build trust, and ultimately improve performance.  Read more about Personal Agility.