Trust = Loyalty = Retention

Flicking through Edelman’s Trust Barometer made me reflect on some solutions I’ve used over the years to build and maintain trust within the different organisations that I’ve worked with.

One of the things that Internal Comms should do is help build employees’ loyalty to the organisation but you can’t have loyalty without trust. So if it’s an issue – or might potentially be one – it needs to be fixed.

The first thing to address is what makes you think there is a lack of trust. Feedback is likely to come from a number of sources – could be formal employee surveys, direct feedback from people via intranet, feedback from managers as to what their people are saying, or just the general rumour mill. Gather it, analyse it, but then the key is to identify what’s causing the mistrust. My experience has been that these are the main reasons:

• Mixed messages – the comms they are given by formal channels don’t match what they are hearing elsewhere. Perhaps their managers aren’t engaged and just brush off their enquiries. Perhaps other people who seem to have more knowledge than them say it ain’t so.
• Unmatched expectations or unmatched experience – the comms they receive lead them to believe something is going to happen in a particular way and it doesn’t.
• Vacuum – they don’t hear anything at all! Beware: rumour rushes to fill a vacuum. One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is persuading senior management that keeping people in the dark doesn’t mean that they will hold their judgement until you decide to let them know what’s going on. By that time they are likely to have heard about it from someone else (probably a few someone elses) and no need to guess how accurate and balanced that information is going to be...
• Puff – this is to do with managing expectations. Not a good idea to puff up the importance of a change if it will fall flat when people hear about it. They just feel let down.
• Secrecy – if you only give the absolute minimum of information and refuse to answer questions with no explanation then people rightly feel aggrieved.
• Same old, same old – I worked with one organisation that was on its third transformation programme in five years. Not surprisingly they were unenthusiastic about ‘another change being done to them’ when the previous efforts had been unsuccessful. Why should they trust the next one to be more successful than the previous ones?
• Ivory tower – senior managers can get isolated from the people on the front line. This is difficult because senior managers are busy and, powerful though it is, making a personal visit is regarded as too time-consuming. Also, I have to say, there can be some reluctance from certain types of senior managers to expose themselves to a questioning front line.
• Wrong tone – a mismatch between the tone of the communications and the culture of the organisation can cause mistrust of the message. Social media may help over time here, but there is still a tendency for some organisations to adopt a very formal tone for ‘official’ communications. Stiff language provokes a stiff reaction.
• Geographical differences – there are differences between countries with regard to their culture and ways of working as well as their legislation.  I think that expansion into new countries without putting enough effort into bringing them on board can cause problems later. There can also be differences within countries.  Smaller locations can feel left out; bigger locations can develop their own sub-culture that affects their perception of the information they are given.

Once you know what’s causing it, you can decide what to do about it. This might be obvious – for instance, if mixed messages are problem, work for consistency; if it’s the tone, change it; if it’s a senior leadership team issue, maybe from lack of ownership or visibility, then you must find a way for them to demonstrate their ownership and support of what’s being communicated.

I always advocate communication to be made little and often. If you have built up trust through maintaining effective two-way communication, people will be much more likely to be understanding if something goes wrong. It’s surprising how people leading change don’t want to think about things not going to plan considering how often this happens. Not acknowledging something has gone wrong is short-sighted and undermines credibility, particularly if it transpires that people will be affected in a different way than they expected. 

I’m struck how young people are growing up in a world where there is less trust compared to when I was their age. The internet and emails suddenly dropping into inboxes looking to trick you into giving money or personal details mean they grow up to be on their guard, they don’t take things at face value. The integrity of politicians, journalists, the courts, even the police is questioned. That just means we will need to work harder and engage better to take people with us on the journey.