Do you trust your employees?

Trust at work is one of the major pillars of a thriving business. We place trust in our staff while they, hopefully, place theirs in us. Then at the end of everything is a customer, client, service user or others who we need to trust all of us, in order to be a successful organisation.

In 2021, a survey from Catalyst found that only 46% of employees report "always" or "often" being trusted at work. This fell to a little over a third for non-management employees, and rose to more than half for management employees. Women were also 6% less likely to report being trusted than men. These are serious problems, because the study also found trust to be a significant predictor of employee engagement.

Employee engagement is absolutely vital for helping to boost productivity, reduce staff turnover and attract top talent. Trust permeates every level of what we do, regardless of industry. When you break trust at work, it doesn't always recover. And if it doesn't, businesses can be doomed to struggle.

Workplace trust can be broadly split into two categories:

1. How much do managers and leaders trust their employees to work diligently while upholding the values of the company?
2. And to what extent can staff trust their management to do right by them while maintaining a high standard of ethics and giving employees something larger than themselves to work towards?

What makes an employee untrustworthy?

It can all start from the first time we meet, during the hiring process.  Studies have shown that applicants lie both on applications and during the interview itself. In fact, a survey from Checkster found that 78% of respondents lied on their job application in 2020.

People mainly do this to conform to job requirements Usually, any exaggerations of one's skills will become clear relatively early within a new job. This never works in the employee's favour, and could lead to resentment and lack of trust on the interviewer's part.

In 2021, a survey of Polish employees broke down the list of reasons they gave for lying in job interviews:

• Being unemployed for a long time (24%).
• Not meeting the requirements of the job offer (18%).
• Being stressed by the interview (17%).
• Pushing for a higher salary (11%).
• Trying to build self-esteem (7%).
• Thinking they won't get caught (5%)
• Other unlisted reasons (18%).

What about your existing staff?

But that's not all there is to it. Mistrust doesn't just apply to new hires. Maybe you're a new manager trying to head up a pre-existing team. Or maybe you gave someone a laundry list of chances, only to write them off after working with them for a while.

To understand why employers can lack trust in their work force, it is vital to understand of what makes a bad employee. Unfortunately, it's a little more complicated than 'someone who does their job poorly.' A study by the Center for Creative Leadership surveyed business leaders worldwide and asked them to rank problematic employee behaviours.

As you might expect, poor job performance was the top response, but the other responses in the top eleven highlight the complexity of the issue. They included the inability to work with others, lack of personal responsibility and poor work ethic.

Interestingly, lack of the correct skills was only the tenth on the list. This suggests that lacking the correct skillset for the job was considered less disruptive than issues that stemmed from personal attitudes. It's also important to remember that many of these issues might stem from an employee struggling with workplace stress or a poor work/life balance.

Stressed or distrustful staff are more likely to lie

A survey of 1,000 employees across the UK, US and Singapore found that over 35% have lied to their employer about their reasons for taking a sick day. Employees with undiagnosed mental health problems were also significantly more likely to lie about this than employees who had a diagnosis.

The study also found that almost 90% of employees were worried about stress affecting their ability to work. But only a quarter rated their employer as providing good support for mental health conditions. That's despite over 70% of HR leaders believing employees don't take enough sick days. Clearly, there's a disconnect between employee expectations, HR concerns, and possibly the priorities of leadership.

What distrust from your boss looks like

One of the key signs that a manager lacks trust in their employees' work is that old favourite, micromanagement. They might go over all your work with an unnecessarily fine-toothed comb, or float around your workstation as though they're just waiting for you to do something stupid. Micromanagement is not an effective way to handle employees, so why does it happen?

The truth is that nobody goes into a leadership role planning to micromanage their team. Very few would admit, even self-critically, to doing it. While the behaviour can stem from having to deal with a difficult employee, it is also often the result of anxiety on the part of the manager, especially if they have people above them judging their performance. A team's output reflects heavily on its leader, after all. For others, it's an extension of their desire to be in charge.

The effects of poor trust levels at work

Put simply, a lack of trust comes right out of your bottom line. People who trust each other will make more money together than those who don't. We've known this for a while. For example, in research published in The Economic Journal under the title "Trust and Growth" in 2001.

Paul J. Zak, one of the researchers from this study, continued to spend years studying the concept of trust. He went on to publish an article in Harvard Business Review entitled, "The Neuroscience of Trust," discussing the importance of trust in the workplace:

'Employees in high-trust organizations 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.'

According to Zak, this was the statistical breakdown of his findings: Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies reported 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout.

Stress is one of the most prevalent issues in the workplace today, both for executives and employees. And if the employer doesn't trust their staff, it follows that they will struggle to gain loyalty from their team. So if distrust is such a huge factor in productivity, how can we tackle it?

Building trust at work

Trust issues in the workplace aren't new, but tackling them requires modern solutions. We can't stress enough how important healthy communication is. The only way to get to the root of these issues is to talk to the employee in question. If someone is being dishonest with you, it could stem from a lack if trust on their part. But it could also simply be down to poor communication habits making you seem unapproachable.

Employees who feel their manager cares about them are more likely to express loyalty to them and the company, and loyal people are more productive. So by addressing an individual's issues, executives stand to strengthen an employee's connection to the company and deal with their own concerns at the same time.

But executives running large companies hardly have the time to go through each cubicle, sitting down with everyone in turn. Not to mention that everyone hates annual performance reviews.

So a streamlined, digitised review process could be incredibly useful in fostering a trusting work environment. Using Weekly10 as an example, weekly check-ins take only a few minutes and are highly customisable.

This has the dual benefit of making the employee feel like they matter while enabling our managers to keep an eye on their staff using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), make concise and relevant feedback and do it all without aggressively micromanaging their team.