High Trust Organisations – Event Review

All too often trust is regarded as something soft and fluffy with the result that it is overlooked but it is a fundamental part of society that underpins so many aspects of our lives and businesses.

The recent Murray Uniforms Live Event brought together an array of speakers who highlighted the importance of trust and its many impactful dimensions.

Tim Threipland, organisation development practice lead at FranklinCovey Europe, says:

“Trust is still seen as a soft skill, the dark arts, but it can be used effectively by businesses. Modern organisations run on trust and it should be absolutely front and centre. It then ripples out across the business. It’s not just a Gen Z thing.”

Trust is the lubrication of business

He suggests trust is the lubrication in an organisation that boosts efficiency: “A high trust culture means things get done quicker. High trust organisations have a turnover rate less than a third of others in the same industry. The waves of trust are broad, encompassing self, relationships, organisational, market and societal.”

For the individual, Threipland says trust comes from understanding our surroundings including most critically the people. “We don’t like what we don’t trust and we don’t trust what we don’t understand. Confidence is born of the character and competence of a person, or an organisation. You either trust a person, or an organisation, or you don’t. The second you have a doubt then you don’t trust them.”

Trust in people is fundamental to the story of Paul Cowley, director of rehabilitation at Iceland, who says that after a spell in prison his life was turned around by the decision of one man. Despite rules in the Army against it employing anyone with a criminal record he “gave me a chance and put his trust in me, which completely changed my life”.

“I was brought up not trusting anyone. It’s very hard to trust people if you’ve been let down. Whether in prison or businesses, it’s all the same, if you do not have trust. People in prisons are in a situation of hopelessness [without trust],” he says.

People in prison are potential assets

Based on his experience Cowley recognises that people in prison as potential assets, locked up potential, and now promotes the argument that businesses need to also think like that. By linking up with Sir Malcolm Walker, founder of the Iceland supermarket chain – who placed trust in Cowley – the ‘Second Chance Programme’ has been created to employ former prisoners.

The vision is to have 10% of the company’s 30,000 employees sourced from prisons and in these early stages of the programme 370 are currently working at Iceland after a total of 650 job offers have been given to men in various prisons following interviews with 900.

The unique aspect of the programme, according to Cowley, is that the job offer is guaranteed, it is at their preferred location, and it does not rely on a second interview when they are released:

“This builds trust. There’s no second interview where they are potentially let down. They are [ultimately] more loyal employees with less turnover and less absenteeism. And it’s the right thing to do.”

Investing in uniforms builds trust

Part of this building of trust is the investment Iceland is making in these new employees. This can take many forms including uniforms that can, among other things, create a feeling of belonging.

Miranda Elliott, central operations director at Card Factory, has been working with Murray for six years and had the objective of overhauling the uniforms to create coherence as well as improved comfort and wear-ability. “It erodes trust when colleagues are not feeling invested in. We were not previously letting employees have these basic tools for their jobs,” she says.

Although Elliott says Card Factory would find it difficult to find a direct correlation between retention and the new uniforms the company has enjoyed “great feedback” from the initiative, which has impacted all employees including the thousands of seasonal workers.

Trust in employers is certainly a delicate affair, according to Catherine Fallon, lead consultant at Power in People, who says it can vary across an organisational chart. Senior leaders trust CEOs but the front-line employees only trust people like themselves. They are 2.5-times less likely to trust a CEO than is a senior person in the company. She says PwC suggests mistrust is often down to miscommunications, incompetence and failure to deliver on promises.

Building an environment of trust

Sophie Francis, connectivity lead at Nestlé, says the four levels of trust are: inclusion safety that includes diversity; learner safety whereby people can ask questions; contributor safety where people can put forward ideas; and challenger safety involving employees reaching across internal group silos.

The current move towards work-from-home represents a challenge for companies and how the four levels need to be recognised across more groups in organisations as the ways people work are changing dramatically. “It changes how we interact with employees. We need to find a way to build connectivity and trust in this new environment,” she says.

The way companies are perceived by customers is another dynamic of trust. Ebru Ozguc, group strategic marketing director at Babcock, says a survey undertaken by Vodafone with the London School of Economics found the three key values to measure business trust are: alignment of values; humanity and kindness; and consistency.

These are the factors that determine customer’s levels of trust of businesses and maybe it is not surprising that overall the survey found businesses scored themselves on average across all sectors with 83 out of 100 across the three trust factors whereas their customers rated them a lesser 72 out of 100.

Maintaining trust

These ratings can change dramatically when a crisis occurs as it did at the CBI when the organisation found itself in the midst of a media storm, according to Emma Connolly, talent development director at CBI, who says: “Although public trust was lost and the CEO left very publicly we kept the trusted relationships in place. The brand and trust was with our colleagues. There was no challenge to this on a personal level. We had the competence but there were questions about character in certain pockets.”

The CBI has since gone through an extensive listening exercise and has been very open and adopted a willingness to change while also recognising employee wellbeing and giving colleagues the tools for building resilience.

Where the organisation had slipped up, according to Connolly, was in getting the message out there in the early stages of the crisis. Messaging and communication can play an incredibly important role in trust and this is certainly the case for the technology sector.

This is recognised by Richard Potter, director of digital strategy at Microsoft, who says the major developments within AI by the company presents the challenge of having to balance the good that the technology can deliver with the fact that data centres powering AI contribute significantly to global carbon emissions.

Messaging and communications are crucial

Microsoft is working on three strands – responsible AI, sustainable AI and democratised AI –to address the situation and take agency for the impact of its AI solutions and therefore present the organisation as a trusted party within the technology field.

“We cannot realise the value of AI without trust. At Microsoft we’re trying to sustain trust at the same time as there is great change and disruption in the world. There are multi-dimensional efforts from Microsoft and others. We all have agency in this,” says Potter, who is clearly playing his part of spreading the message.

Another organisation that needs to focus on its communications is the government, according to Mark Berrisford-Smith, independent economist at MBS Insights, who suggests the government needs to better manage the country’s expectations on the economy otherwise there will always be a level of mistrust.

He questions why the UK population trusts the government less than any other organisation or profession and suspects it has a lot to do with the fact that we are no longer enjoying increasing standards of living. Between 2008 and 2023 the standard of living increased by 5% whereas across the previous 15 years it jumped an impressive 45%.

“Would the trust scores be better if the economy was better or have the pandemic and Brexit caused it? Trust also depends on what we expect. If something does not meet our expectations then we don’t trust it. But are our expectations reasonable [for the economy] or are we set up for endless disappointments?”

Glynn Davis – Founder of Retail Insider