When you build employee trust, employees feel like they are an essential part of your organization. Your staff works with more engagement and dedication. Thus, you experience more efficiency and productivity from your teams.
However, here’s the thing. Building trust with your employees is not easy at all. Why? That’s because they are not your friends or family members, and you are not theirs, either.
Do you have an idea that employees and teams in trust atmospheres are 76% more engaged in their work? Overall, you need to maintain a 100% professional bond while making your employees feel neither too comfortable nor too uncomfortable.
However, what do you need to do to achieve that? In today’s blog post, we will tell you all about the top 20 ways to build employee trust and more. With that out of our way, let’s get started right away with it.
What is Trust Building in the Workplace?
Building trust in the workplace is what we call consistent and continuous efforts to gain confidence from your employees in your attitude and work credibility. It is a crucial part of all interactions in your organization. Overall, trust exists in your business at every level.
The employees and managers need to trust their business and leadership to succeed and give effective outcomes.
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2 Types of Employee Trust in the Workplace
We will give it to you straight, when you build employee trust, you need to work equally towards improving it practically as well as emotionally:
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You earn this one via what you do. For instance, meeting deadlines, clocking in on time, and keeping your promises. It makes you reliable and competent, ensuring that there’s no need for micromanagement. |
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This involves making your employees emotionally connect to you, your organization, and your objectives. Gaining this level of trust requires you to help your employees, meet their expectations, and support your teams. |
The 9 Pros of Building Trust in the Workplace
Make your workday more productive
Time tracking and work management can help you reach your goals
faster.
Maintaining workplace trust, regardless of how you do it, provides you with many advantages. Here are some of the positives you will experience.
- Engage and retain your employees.
- Maintain a strong hybrid and remote work culture
- Provide a meaningful experience to your employees
- Build and maintain your brand
- Increasing trust creates a sense of security and dependability among human resources.
- It develops mutually beneficial bonds and boosts team productivity.
- Trust among employees, managers, and teams provides a higher chance of excelling at projects as they agree on solutions, respect each other’s perspectives, and resolve conflicts faster.
- Increasing trust improves staff morale in your workplace.
Top 20 Ways to Build Employee Trust in the Workplace
To make the job even easier, we have shortlisted proven methods that increase the trust you get from your staff members. They worked in our favor, and so you will have no problem implementing these solutions either. So, here are 20 of the best methods to build employee trust in the workplace for improving performance and boosting employee retention rates.
1. Active Listening
That’s the first step. Listen more than you speak. Plus, you need to listen properly to your employees.
You already know that communication is a two-way channel, and to build employee trust in the workplace, you need to apply this practice.
2. Act on Feedback
Employee feedback is not a prized collection, trophy, or achievement that you can just keep around for show and tell. You need to work on it. You need to understand that employee feedback is genuine and that if something’s unexpected in it, then you need to change it immediately.
3. Appreciate Employees
Even if you appreciate your employees for short achievements, such as reaching a milestone, it goes a long way towards making them feel like a genuine part of your organization. It’s the little efforts such as these that build employee trust in the workplace.
4. Empower Your Teams
Another essential thing to gain trust from your employees is to believe in their skills. You need to empower your employees to make certain decisions and see what happens. According to our experience, doing so always leads to better outcomes as employees don’t feel the pressure and can work at a suitable pace.
5. Coach Your Staff
A sure-shot way to build employee trust in the workplace is to coach your staff and not preach to them. Be a leader and not a boss. Speaking of which, you must have heard of that picture meme that differentiates the two. It’s crucial not to take it lightly, as it conveys the reality of today’s work world.
6. Be Consistent
It’s important not to expect your employees to start trusting you and your decisions all of a sudden. The best way is to be consistent and keep putting every ounce of effort toward maximizing employee trust.
7. Non-Verbal Communication Matters
Hand signals, body posture, and other little details build employee trust in the workplace more naturally. For instance:
- Don’t slouch
- Speak confidently with authority but not rudely.
- Smile
- Look your workers in the eyes when speaking with them. This boosts their confidence and belief in you as well.
8. Include Everyone
Be inclusive in your approach. Making your employees and other human resources a part of your meetings increases trust. This is due to transparency and openness. It is also wise to have everyone suggest a solution. You might just find a successor for your designation.
9. Honesty & Transparency are Keys
To gain trust from anyone requires honesty and clarity. It’s the same when it comes to building employee trust in the workplace. You need to be honest with yourself and with your employees here. Your employees will only trust you when they know that you will hide nothing from them.
- Especially when it’s related to their work.
10. Trust with Recognition
As we mentioned before, recognizing employees for even their smallest efforts assists you in building and maintaining trust. So, what if you start trusting your employees with recognition? That will just take the professional bond to another level.
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11. Use Data
Remember that trust is measurable. So, to build employee trust in the workplace, you need to analyze the recognition data you have. This way you will know whether:
- The trust is strong
- It is faltering
- Your teams are forming internal disputes.
By analyzing this data, you can take the right action at the right time before the trust issues become too big.
12. Fulfill Your Promises
No one trusts a person who can’t keep her or his promises. For example, if you announce that all employees who achieve a 20% sales hike this month will get an incentive. However, when they succeed at it, your excuse is that the organization is low on budget.
So, that’s that. Either don’t promise your employees anything or if you do, keep it and enjoy the fruit of increased trust from your staff. We wish you good luck for the same.
13. Have Integrity
Similarly, if you have a value system, you need to have some integrity as well. You need to cling to it to build employee trust in the workplace. If your personality, attitude, and values keep flickering, then your employees won’t trust you.
- That’s because you can’t even trust yourself.
14. Lead by Example
A good way to gain trust from your employees is to demonstrate what you expect from them. Show them that even you can do it, and keep a if you can, then they can as well attitude. This inspires your employees to put in more effort, and they start trusting you and your abilities.
15. Help Your Teams
You can also help your teams as much as possible to build employee trust in the workplace. Inspire them, discuss solutions, and keep pushing through towards success. This shows your employees that you can be trusted, and they get the confidence to visit you in case of any issue.
16. Learn
Be willing to learn. Take every opportunity to learn new skills. Even if it’s from your newest hire.
- The bottomline is that the more you are willing to learn, the more trustworthy you become.
17. Be Responsible
Another way to inspire and motivate your employees to put in more effort is to take responsibility for your decisions. It is generally noted that responsible people are seen as more trustworthy. So, it is another way to build employee trust in the workplace.
18. Know Your Teams
The reason you trust your father is that he knows you very well and he understands why you did what you did without even you telling. The situation is similar with your teams. You need to know and understand:
- The perspective of your team members.
- The way they brainstorm solutions.
- Their workflow trends and everything else.
19. Schedule Team Building Activities
Here’s where you have to put in a little effort to build employee trust in the workplace. Scheduling team-building activities is a great way for everyone to know each other and strengthen professional trust. This is also great to assist employees in working together in coordination.
20. Use Employee Monitoring Software
Implementing the right employee monitoring software is a useful aid in creating and maintaining staff trust in your organization. Beyond increasing employee efficiency and productivity, it can also help you know the bond in your teams. For example, you will instantly know if there is a lack of cooperation, if there is a mismatch in the work-time utilization reports.
Conclusion
We hope that you have wrapped your head around the best ways to build employee trust in the workplace. As a final word, we would love to say that strong professional trust and a bond go a long way towards higher efficiency, productivity, and profitability. The bottomline is that if your employees don’t trust you emotionally and practically, and vice versa, there is no point in putting in any effort at work.
That’s because there will be no cooperation and coordination, which are the key ingredients towards successful projects. Simply put, if your teams can’t work together, then you won’t get the expected output. So, everyone needs to put their differences aside and work towards the common objective.
For the same, you need the best proven methods and tools. However, it’s better to use one tool that does it all. We use DeskTrack for monitoring employee tasks, trust, and success.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. What are the 3 Cs of Building Trust in the Workplace?
Ans. You need to know these 3 Cs first to build workplace trust.
- Competence
- Character
- Connection
Q. Why Does Trust in the Workplace Matter?
Ans. It does matter. It helps you:
- Engage and retain your employees.
- Maintain a strong hybrid and remote work culture
- Provide a meaningful experience to your employees
- Build and maintain your brand
- Increasing trust creates a sense of security and dependability among human resources.
- It develops mutually beneficial bonds and boosts team productivity.
- Trust among employees, managers, and teams provides a higher chance of excelling at projects as they agree on solutions, respect each other’s perspectives, and resolve conflicts faster.
- Increasing trust improves staff morale in your workplace.
Q. What are the 2 Types of Workplace Trust?
Ans. You need to put in enough effort to gain:
- Emotional trust of your employees
- Practical trust of your staff
Q. What Does a Lack of Trust Look Like in the Workplace?
Ans. A lack of trust in your organization results in:
- Micromanagement
- Poor communication
- Disengagement
- Employees not sharing their ideas
- Slowed collaboration
- Reduced employee morale
- Lack of cohesion across teams
- High employee turnover rates
Q. How to Build Employee Trust in the Workplace?
Ans. Try these 20 proven methods.
- Active Listening
- Act on Feedback
- Appreciate Employees
- Empower Your Teams
- Coach Your Staff
- Be Consistent
- Non-Verbal Communication Matters
- Include Everyone
- Honesty & Transparency are Keys
- Trust with Recognition
- Use Data
- Fulfill Your Promises
- Have Integrity
- Lead by Example
- Help Your Teams
- Learn
- Be Responsible
- Know Your Teams
- Schedule Team Building Activities
- Use Employee Monitoring Software
