Unfortunately, this crisis of trust towards companies comes at a time when trusting and being trusted by their people is more important than ever for most organizations. And there are several reasons for that.
First, today companies operate in a world of complex jobs where the difference in value between what an excellent professional can bring and what an average professional provides is larger than in the past. In this scenario people make the difference, and this is the reason why many organizations find themselves in the midst of a war for talent that knows no borders. However, many of those professionals are not willing to work for any organization that does not deserve their trust…
Besides, in the economy of knowledge and creativity, it’s not enough for companies to hire obedient people who know how to do their jobs. Companies need people who, from day one, bring new perspectives and dare to challenge the status quo, raising uncomfortable questions, and experimenting with new solutions without fear of making a mistake. And this is something that is very difficult to make happen if trust is absent.
In addition, we need to take into account that we live in a volatile world where companies die younger and employment-for-life is water under the bridge, so the relationships between people and the organizations they work for are now shorter. Also we live in a hyper-connected and “infoxicated” world, where sometimes it is difficult to separate what is true from what is not true. And those, of course, are not the best foundations for the emergence and development of trust relationships.
Yet the real tragedy is that many companies act as if they don’t care about not having the trust of their people. As if those relationships of trust did not have any value for them. Whereas our research proves that trust in an organization is vitally important.
We just need to look around us. Way too often the news reports evidence that for many corporations their interests come first. In the eyes of these companies the ends justify the means, sometimes up to the point that some of them ignore the law and the common good, as in the recent case of the emissions of Volkswagen cars.
But there is no need to resort to such extreme examples. Many companies that comply with the letter of the law lose the trust of their people as a consequence of the accumulation of smaller events in their day-to-day: unfair decisions, arbitrary changes in the rules of the game, politicking, short-termism, broken promises, inconsistent behavior, leaders who take credit for other people’s work…
In other occasions the problem is the lack of reciprocity. How can leaders expect their employees to trust them if they don’t listen to their employees, act with opacity, stifle dissenting voices, punish mistakes, or don’t give them autonomy to do their work and grow?
Whatever the reason, the fact is that there are many companies, probably way too many, where trust, an inherent social nature of human factor, is not present.
And no matter if they hang big value statements on their walls, knock down the walls of their offices to create open spaces, their executives take off their ties, or declare that people are “their most valued asset”. At the end of the day, the long-term result of that lack of trust will always be the same: dehumanized work environments where information will not flow freely and it will be hard for people to give their best at work.