Trust starts with transparency in the workplace

Trust is the biggest issue in workplaces today. Everyone talks about it, yet only some know how to solve it. How to create a trusted space for work?

We know all the benefits. The more trust you have, your employees are more loyal, engaged, and productive. There is an army of HR and people professionals who built entire programs around this - yet, I think they are missing the point. All of them. 

Today, I'll talk about we can create a trusted environment at work. Not with giving talks around it, not with training programs, not with DEI and the rest of these - no. By actually doing something actionable. 

You can't create trust directly.

So if you gather a few people around a table and have a facilitated conversation around trust, they would all agree that, yes, it is important. This is how to phrase things to be more trustworthy, yada-yada. 

Once they leave the table, they return to work, where they have to deal with a manager who's late for all meetings but asks for daily reports on how things are going. So long for the conversation/training around trust.

We need to understand that we can't create trust directly. You can earn trust, cultivate it, and grow it, but you can't just throw resources on it; boom, you have a trusted place to work at. That's not how it works.

You can create trust only indirectly. Taking specific steps together will indirectly lead to more trust in the organization.

The importance of transparency

Transparency and trust go hand-in-hand with organizations. Trust is the emotional driving force, but transparency is the glass door that invites you in. 

Proximity creates trust. This is why you "fall in love" with people from high school, university, or even the workplace. But an organization is a concept. And concepts should be transparent to get close to them. 

Our goal is to create a more transparent workplace. The more transparent the workplace is, the higher your trust is. Trusting something we see, understand, and adopt is easier. 

More access = more transparency = more trust

Now that we know that transparency is important and trust can be created only indirectly, we need the last piece of the puzzle. And that is the levels of access. 

Transparency is all about having access to certain things. The ability to see and understand. 

At the workplace, there are 5 areas where you can give more access to your employees. The more access you give, the more transparent your workplace becomes. 

The five access levels are:

1. Information. The best way to access information is to have a company hub in the cloud, and everyone has unrestricted access to the hub.

2. Operations. How you work together should be understandable by anyone. The best way is through processes, templates, and shared project management. The more you document how you work, the better everyone has access.

3. Communication. Everyone should be able to understand what is going on. Team-wide meetings are shared with everyone as outcomes. 1:1s only for support or mentorship. Don't leave people out of the loop.

4. Performance. Access to performance indicators should be the norm for everyone in the company. How the team performs? How the company performs? Growth and other numbers?

5. Decision. How do you make decisions? In the ivory tower or collaboratively? The outcomes of decisions are directives or agreements?

Now everyone has their own taste in this, plus, some companies cannot share all their information with all their team members. But the rule of thumb is simple. 

The higher the access level you provide, the more transparent the company becomes. 

And indirectly, the more transparent the company is, the higher your trust in the organization. 

Where's the action?

Now, implementing access levels is highly actionable. It's not a talk you give to others on "this is trust." It is a plan that you implement.

Trust is not a people problem. It is an operational problem. 

Creating a company hub with all the information there, synched, shared, organized, structured, and collaboratively designed, is not a people problem. It's merely an operational challenge.

Same as project management, policies, communicational methodologies, decision-making processes, and so on.

The only people problem is this: how to convince managers to provide equal, unrestricted access to everything for everyone. 

I gave a long speech on trust, transparency, and how it is an operational challenge for companies at the Lighthouse Leaders Group's Happy and Engaged Team Summit. 

You can watch the recorded presentation on our Hub.

Let me know how you cultivate more trust in your organization.  

Peter

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