Photo by Tobias Negele on Unsplash
I’m going to make a bold statement here: trust is the backbone of all effective, positive, and empathetic workplaces (and likely, of every other aspect of our lives).
Think about it. Trust means you can fully “relax” into your own sense of belonging. That you feel comfortable enough to be your authentic self. That you don’t have to stand on the edge of anxiety, worried that you’ll say or do the wrong thing and be scorned for it.
If you’ve ever experienced a breakdown in trust, you know what I mean. Whether the break in trust happened in a personal relationship or a working environment, you know that everything sort of “shut down” afterward.
Once there's a lack of trust, in other words, it’s really hard to recover it.
But in an environment where trust is prevalent, the opposite is true. Things flow. People have the freedom to behave authentically. There’s less judgment. There’s less overall strife.
In a work environment full of trust, employees and managers—of all levels and departments—thrive.
Why Trust is Important in the Workplace
Similar to your relationships outside of work that require trust to build a strong foundation, trust at work plays an essential role in the success of any organization. Here are a few reasons why:
Trust Builds Safety and Purpose
Humans love to feel like they are part of something bigger. At work, this desire to be a productive contributor to a team starts with collaboration and having trust among the people on your team. No one wants to be part of a team where there is a lack of trust.
Trust Increases Productivity
Trust increases productivity and enhances teamwork. Working as a team is much easier when you have trust because trust builds safety. Psychological safety allows a team to be vulnerable, take risks, and have trust that they can stretch their limits. Teams that have an environment of trust and safety are more willing to try new things, give feedback, step in and out of leadership, and be creative problem solvers, too.
Trust Help Retain and Engage Employees
Similar to personal relationships, you probably aren't going to stick around if you don't have trust. Having trust in the workplace is a leading driver of the employee experience and employee retention. With trust in the workplace, organizations benefit from decreased turnover.
Another benefit of your employees not spending time looking for a new job is they will be more engaged on the job and produce their best work. Job satisfaction and employee morale also increase in a workplace that builds a strong foundation of trust.
Workplaces that lack trust are often toxic workplaces and include bad bosses, micro-management, and gaslighting. We should mention these are all good reasons to leave a job, too!
The bottom line? Trust helps your workplace build a foundation of collaboration, creativity, respect, and integrity. Let's ensure your organization is prioritizing it. Here are a few ideas to get started.
11 Ways to Build Trust at Work
Paul J. Zak’s Harvard Business Review article, The Neuroscience of Trust, explains the far-reaching benefits of creating a work culture that maintains a high level of trust.
Through decades-long research, he found that “Compared with low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report 74 percent less stress, 106 percent more energy at work, 50 percent higher productivity, 13 percent fewer sick days, 76 percent more engagement, 29 percent more satisfied with their lives, and 40 percent less burnout.”
Those statistics are really something.
If trust in the workplace is this important, let’s get down to it. Here are 11 ways to build true, lasting trust in your work environment.
1. Create a Transparent Culture
We’ve talked a lot about transparency in terms of salary. In the workplace, that really matters. Salary transparency means that leadership explains their compensation methodology or the “why” behind employees' salaries.
This transparency is healthy for everyone. It means that leadership’s reasoning is transparent—and that employees know that they’re being paid fairly and equitably. This inherently helps with building trust.
But we say take the transparency notion a bit further. We think it should bleed into just about every other aspect of the work environment, as well. For example, if employees and managers are transparent about their strengths and weaknesses, imagine how teams could work effectively together. Someone with stronger communication skills could handle a team’s external-facing tasks.
A team member who’s highly organized and detail-oriented could help create the team calendar or weekly agenda. In short, being transparent means that your team has the opportunity to amplify every person’s skills—and the whole team is strengthened.
Transparency in the workplace also means less room for secrets. There’s less opportunity for office gossip, cliques, or any other exclusionary behavior that can take hold in toxic workplaces. Transparency allows the “light” to shine through so that people can thrive.
2. Ditch Faux Perfection
We’ve all seen it (or we’ve done it). When someone pretends to be perfect or puts on a “front” of perfectionism, it can be really jarring. It feels almost deceiving and makes the person feel entirely unrelatable.
Without getting too philosophical here, this kind of perfectionism “shield” often happens when people don’t feel safe enough to make mistakes or to let their authentic self show up. Maybe they’re inherently insecure because of trauma from their upbringing. Maybe they were bullied about something. Maybe they’re new to the office and they’re feeling shy (been there).
Create a workplace where what’s expected—and valued—is imperfection. Imperfection isn’t negative. It means that you place value on the universality of being human (and all of the messiness that entails). Placing value on imperfection means that everyone is free to be themselves, to make mistakes, to learn and grow—without feeling like they have to wear a front of perfectionism to succeed.
3. Share Credit Generously
We all want to feel that our work is “worth” something. (Though we’re quick to clarify here that your work isn’t what makes you “worthy.”)
Sharing credit generously at work means that you ensure that those who have helped on a project, contributed to an important presentation, or showed up early to pick up slack for a colleague who was out sick, receive credit for their contributions.
Acknowledgment makes people feel seen. People who feel seen are more likely to feel valued. People who feel valued are happier, more productive employees.
This one is simple: dole out credit where it’s due. Ensure your peers or your teammates know how much they matter.
4. Be Someone People Want to Work With
The best way to ensure you’re someone people want to work with? By being Empathetic. Empathy encompasses appreciation, acceptance, kindness, and true listening. We all want to work with people who are empathetic and willing to listen to our opinions and experiences.
Along those same lines, this is pretty straightforward advice, but I’ll say it anyway: be kind.
The adage “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” is classic because it’s true. Everyone really is fighting their own proverbial battles—whether it’s an invisible disability, the stress of acting as a caretaker while working, trauma from having lived through the difficult time that was/is the pandemic. It’s best to face any interaction with kindness first.
In addition to kindness, being generally helpful and willing to pick up slack when others need it fosters a sense of trust. Coworkers trust that you’ll be kind to them and that they can rely on you in times of need. And, in turn, they’re likely to do the same for you. This kind of attitude is the antithesis of the toxic workplace—and it’s a really nice place to be.
5. Say What You Mean
We put kindness above this part for a reason. We don’t mean “say what you mean” as in “be brutally honest for the sake of honesty and trust”—or as Taylor Swift puts it, “casually cruel in the name of being honest.” No, we mean being straightforward so that there’s clear communication.
Being straightforward (in a nice way) is inherently trust-making. If you’re beating around the bush before saying something, you may come across as shifty or leave the person you’re speaking to with the feeling that you’re hiding something. This is not great for trust. But if your workplace fosters open and clear dialogue, trust follows.
If you have something difficult to tell your boss, say it. If you need extra help on a project, say it. If you have constructive criticism to give, give it. Honesty leads to trust and trust to honesty. Being straightforward helps create a culture of trust.
6. Use the Platinum Rule
My seventh-grade classroom had a banner with the Golden Rule above the whiteboard: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” We probably all heard this over and over as children. And, arguably, it’s good advice for a child.
But as adults in multifaceted and complex work environments (or, really, when navigating any aspect of life), the Golden Rule isn’t quite enough.
Enter the Platinum Rule. The Platinum Rule says, “Do unto others as they would want to be done to them.”
Rather than imagining what you would want, you infuse more empathy into the Golden Rule and think about what they would want. This might mean taking into account a colleague’s life experience, skill set, background, upbringing, work style, work love language, or any other relevant details.
It means valuing—and learning from—experiences that are different from your own. It means trusting and appreciating your colleagues' lived experiences and meeting those with kindness and understanding.
7. Reveal Your True Self (Even the Ugly Stuff)
In my former life, I was a high school English teacher. I was young and only taught for three years, but I learned right off the bat that a fast way to establish trust in my classroom was to model vulnerability.
I was quick to label myself a nerd (which, to be fair, is probably true), and I was quick to share mistakes I’d made. I tried to show my students how I’d learned from them.
This, in turn, seemed to help my students learn that they were also safe to be vulnerable. That it was okay to make a mistake. That there was nothing shameful about not knowing something. We don’t know what we don’t know. And that’s the whole point of teaching and learning.
All of that to say: in my experience, it helps establish trust if you show those around you the not-so-cool sides of your personality. The nerdiness. The procrastination tendencies. The perfectionism. The anxiety.
Whatever it is that you grapple with, it’s okay to talk about it if you want to. If you’re lucky, this will inspire others to do the same, and you can enjoy relationship building with your colleagues where you’re safe to be yourselves with one another, weird quirks and all.
8. Admit and Apologize (When You’ve Messed Up)
There will always be mistakes and mishaps at work. It’s just a rule of life. And that’s okay! We believe that mistakes offer valuable opportunities for learning and growth. In fact, it’s arguably hard to really learn without making mistakes.
When mistakes do happen, it’s all about how you react to them. After you make a mistake is not the time to blame a colleague or to try to cover up what you’ve done. Rather, you want to own up to your mistake quickly. Own it, even if it’s uncomfortable.
We recognize that this is easier said than done, especially if you find yourself in a workplace that isn’t trust-focused. It places you in a vulnerable position to admit that you’ve messed up. But by summoning the courage and doing so, you’re prioritizing trust over your own feelings of embarrassment. In turn, people will likely continue to trust you despite the mistake you made, even if it was a big one.
9. Encourage Growth and Curiosity
To that end, owning up to a mistake requires a growth mindset. And we think growth mindsets are so important. Growth mindsets mean that you acknowledge that you don’t know it all, even if you’re a true expert in your field. They prioritize intellectual curiosity and lifelong learning.
The desire to grow ties hand in hand with valuing others’ experiences. There’s no room for stagnancy or judgment of others if you meet people with curiosity and without judgment and recognize that you always, always have more to learn.
If your work environment emphasizes that learning is cool and knowing it all is uncool, it’s a good sign. Knowing it all ties into faux perfectionism.
None of us know it all. None of us are perfect. Why not just have that out in the open so that we can relish in the fact that we have so many fun things to learn?
10. Prioritize Autonomy
People tend to trust others when they feel trusted.
If your boss trusts you with a major project that you know is important, it makes you feel empowered, right? But employee engagement is not the only benefit of placing trust in your team or your colleagues.
According to Professor Zak, “autonomy promotes innovation because people try different approaches.” That is, trusting members of your team to take charge of their own work means that they’re likely to innovate or figure out a process that’s more efficient for everyone.
It’s easy to see the importance of autonomy when you consider that no one likes a micromanager boss. They’re annoying, but the real root of the issue with micromanagers is that they inherently make you feel distrusted. By managing every aspect of your workload, they make you feel as if they don’t trust your discretion. This doesn’t feel good.
If everyone has some autonomy, the buy-in is greater. It’s better for everyone involved.
11. Be Vulnerable
Brené Brown says that “the opposite of belonging is fitting in. Fitting in is assessing and acclimating...Belonging is belonging to yourself first. Speaking your truth, telling your story, and never betraying yourself for other people. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are. And that’s vulnerable.”
It’s hard to be vulnerable. It takes courage. It takes integrity. It’s hard to “be yourself” with a group of people who aren’t your friends or your family. It takes trust.
But if you have a sense of belonging to yourself, you probably have strong trust in yourself, too. And that’s really what it all comes down to, right?
What to Do to Rebuild Trust in The Workplace
Trust is not built overnight. It requires consistent behaviors that are modeled by your actions, not your words. Even more important that the leaders inside the organization model these behaviors.
If trust has been broken in your workplace, here are a few ways to recover:
- Take responsibility and own your mistake(s)
- Commit to change and share how you will implement this change
- Address the root cause—where did the breakdown in trust happen?
- Have open communication and often (can you share information that helps build trust, like cc'ing someone on an email?)
- Be consistent and patient while you work to rebuild trust
