How employers can increase employee trust

One in four employees don’t trust their employer, according to a survey by the American Psychological Association. The survey also says that around half of employees think their company is being open and honest with them. These things combined, make me wonder who it is that trusts the same company that they believe is not being open and honest with them?

There’s always been a good amount of distrust between management and personnel. And a lot of that distrust is earned. For instance, I received an email today from an employee who had asked for time off 2 months prior, but his supervisor had failed to submit it to the higher ups for approval. Then, in order to cover his behind, the supervisor demanded that the employee sign something stating that he had not asked for the time off in advance. I wish this type of behavior was rare.

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6 thoughts on “How employers can increase employee trust

  1. “Trust” is a fuzzy term. “Open and honest” is…well, it’s still fuzzy, but a bit less so.

    Allow me to offer a (personal) explanation of why I’d answer the two questions very differently.

    I trust my employer. That is, I believe that when I finish a pay period, a paycheck will be forthcoming, for the proper amount, and that it will not bounce. I believe that I will not, as a condition of my employment, be required to engage in any action which is flagrantly immoral, or which violates applicable laws. I believe (and on this I actually have experience to back it up) that if a request from my employer would require me to breach a pre-existing contract with a third party, then my boss and other appropriate authorities will work in good faith to find a way to resolve the situation in a manner which satisfies both ethical constraints and the needs of the business.

    Further, I believe that (at least in the case of my _present_ employer), if I am told something about the business by my boss, or another person in authority over the matter under consideration, then what they tell me will be, _to the best of their current knowledge_, factual.

    The standard of “open and honest” is more rigorous than that, I’m afraid. “Open and honest” would mean not only that I could count on not being _lied_ to, but that people communicating information of strategic relevance had the best practicable access to relevant information from their own higher-ups. “Open and honest” would require a culture that doesn’t promulgate vague notions of collegiality so that naive people might do as one of your recent letter-writers did, and let their boss find out many months ahead of time that they _might_ be considering leaving the company. (I’ve had bosses I got along with so well that we were members of each other’s wedding parties. I’ve never had one I would give that kind of information to. And if I found out that a manager underneath me had learned something like that and _not_ immediately begun searching for a replacement for the employee in question, I would consider it a serious dereliction on their part. Maybe not a firing offense, but definitely an incident requiring corrective action.)

    “Open and honest” presumes an environment in which not only are the interests of business and employee never adverse to each other, but the principal/agent paradox has ceased to operate, and no one in a position of authority ever makes a mistake that they’re too embarrassed to fully confess in public. These situations sometimes happen in friendships and marriages (although even there, it’s not the way to bet, unless the parties involved are exceptional individuals)…but the odds against any entity the size of even a small-ish business practicing it consistently are effectively nil.

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  3. It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of believing the credibility of your manager on a personal level, who just happens to represent the company. This seems to be dependent on whether said manager is corrupted by the power associated with his position. The employee’s choice results in either ignorance or paranoia.

    murgatr

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