Practical Ways to Build Trust in Your Workplace

Practical Ways to Build Trust in Your Workplace

For a company to grow exponentially, employees must have trust in their employers. The employee’s ratio is in the minority who can say they trust their managers and company. Building trust takes time and effort from the company. Here you will learn the ways to build trust in your workplace.

Your company is doing everything right, but still, it is not growing as it should. The reason can be multiple, and one of the reasons is having low trust in your workplace. Without assurance, people get reluctant to put themselves out there.

If they do, then they are vulnerable. And in a different case. When employees trust their employees are likely to be open, honest, etc. All of this will boost productivity and innovation. Before we go deeper, we need to look at why trust matters in the workplace.

Why does trust in the workplace matter?

Trust in the workplace is necessary, and it improves the culture of mutual respect, honesty and more. Employees feel proud to work for the company and are ready to give 100% to complete their tasks.

The employees perform well because they feel secure in their jobs resulting in not switching their jobs more often. It helps the company to reduce the turnover rate.

Building trust among employees has one more benefit. It helps to build employee engagement. It leads to better results for your company and top-notch work. Building workplace trust helps to create a diverse work culture where employees feel attached to the company.

Tips for building trust at your workplace

Avoid micromanaging

When a boss micromanages your verdict, it can work for a while when an employee is new. But it does not work well with experienced employees. They do not prefer to get micromanaged every time.

It can develop trust issues over time between the manager and the employee. No employee wants to get micromanaged at a deep level. What does a company do in this situation? The manager can cool down the micromanaging scenario by trusting the employees.

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It does not mean that the company can leave the employee to make odd decisions. You need to maintain some control over the actions but do not make them feel they are getting micromanaged all the time.

You need to take the help of the software that helps the team divide the task in the team calendar. You can see how the team is approaching the specific goals. You can keep everyone sort without having to micromanage.

Listen to your employees

Your employees are distinct individuals with their ideas and points of view. Invite them to express themselves, and when they do, listen carefully. Positive workplace relationships get built on mutual understanding and trust, and this is the foundation for them.

To improve your listening skills, it is a good idea to engage in active listening training. It involves making a deliberate effort to ask your employees questions and encourage them to elaborate more so you can truly understand what they are trying to communicate.

Every day, there are opportunities to listen. Set aside some time in meetings for employees to talk about their work experience and how they feel, for example. Remember that you should be prepared to listen to both positive and negative feedback and that you must demonstrate that you are open to their suggestions whether or not you agree with them.

Set common goals

Goals are necessary for establishing trust because they define a shared set of values for the team to draw upon and a common destination for the team to pursue.

Working from home has merged our personal, professional, and family lives under one roof. It makes prioritisation difficult.

Setting goals is vital in a virtual environment because they provide a common destination for virtual team members who are geographically separated while working from home.

Set clear, attainable, timely, and well-understood goals for your entire team. In a virtual environment, the importance of timing gets amplified, so be clear when discussing it. Goals can be short-term, mid-term, or long-term.

Setting and sharing goals, particularly immediate and short-term goals, can help to build trust by creating a pool of shared values and giving each team member a chance to contribute.

Do not judge employees on numbers

It is all too easy to get caught up in the numbers. Managers may develop the habit of viewing their employees in terms of output achieved if their job requires them to meet performance metrics.

Managers do not have to be their employee’s best friends, but they do have a responsibility to keep the workplace healthy.

To build a relationship with their team members, they must know them beyond their job descriptions and day-to-day tasks. As a result, managers will be able to provide meaningful recognition and make people feel valued.

It is not necessary to know every detail about personal lives. They can also better support their professional development by doing so.

Overcome bias

Managers have a natural tendency to make assumptions about others. It means that they may unintentionally favour certain employees over others.

The so-called rater bias is a common occurrence. Even when there is no intent to harm or offend a coworker, unconscious bias contributes to a significant loss of trust between managers and employees, especially when performance reviews are involved.

Assist managers and employees in recognising and avoiding unconscious bias in the workplace. You could, for example, host a course, invite an outside speaker to educate employees, or identify relevant events for employees to attend.

Ask for feedback

Managers should be receptive to feedback from their employees. Employees are often hesitant to share constructive feedback, let alone with their manager, which creates a barrier.

Managers who are open to feedback, on the other hand, can gradually cultivate a feedback culture within their teams, increasing trust. Managers can demonstrate their openness by soliciting estimation in person or via email.

Employees will be more open to receiving and reflecting on feedback from their managers from this.

Focus on soft skills

While verbal communication is essential, it is not sufficient. Soft skills such as personality traits, attitudes, behaviours, and nonverbal communication, are equally important.

You will demonstrate your interest in what your employees have to say if you make eye contact with them and nod when they speak rather than checking your email or looking at the clock.

Positive body language, combined with empathy, patience, and problem-solving skills, creates a welcoming environment for employees, encouraging them to approach you.

Most importantly, when communicating, always be genuine and authentic. Employees will lose faith in you if they do not believe you are speaking from the heart. Your team will be more likely to trust you if they feel at ease around you.

Build trust in the workplace

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Build trust from the start

From the moment an employee is hired, a culture of trust gets established. According to one study, a positive onboarding experience reduced turnover by 157 percent. It also resulted in a 54 percent increase in employee engagement in their jobs.

On their first day, new employees rarely know what to expect from their employer. Their initial training and first few weeks on the job will reveal a lot about the types of behaviours expected at work and how things will progress throughout their career.

You immediately build trust and demonstrate the behaviour you expect by creating an onboarding experience.

Show appreciation daily

Yes, your employees get paid for their efforts, but that is not enough to show that you appreciate and trust them.

It is critical to build trust in your workplace and give them regularly, real-time recognition. Sending thank you note, verbal praise, and tangible rewards like bonuses and employee awards are ways to show appreciation.

Everyday appreciation fosters a sense of belonging among employees and helps them feel emotionally secure, so recognising your team will increase their trust in you.

Lean into the direct relationship between trust and recognition if you want to foster faith in your workplace.

It is important to remember that public recognition is just as important as private recognition. Let others in your company know that your employees are doing a fantastic job, preferably with a recognition platform that allows you to recognise employees from anywhere and across all channels.

Acknowledge that you lack knowledge and experience

It is understandable if you do not know everything at work. Your coworkers are extremely valuable because they each contribute something unique to the office’s smooth operation. If a manager or coworker inquires about your experience or knowledge of a subject. Be forthright because it is in the best interests of the office. It will demonstrate to your coworkers that you are trustable.

When you tell a teammate you do not know how to do something, you are not admitting your mistakes; you are putting everyone in a position to start the project right away with people who have the necessary experience.

You can always ask your manager if you can go through training to expand your knowledge base. If there is something you do not know but is a vital part of your office operations.

In Summary

To build trust in your workplace takes time, and it depends on both employees and employers. We know that building trust for an entire organisation might take a lot of time.

Therefore starting it with some members of the company is the way to work. For the team to excel, you need to build an environment of trust in the workplace. In the end, it is all for employee benefits.

About the Author

Ginni Agarwal is a Talent Acquisition Expert at Upright Human Capital with extensive experience in Tech and Non-tech hiring. She loves blogging, writing articles about Talent Acquisition, and Human resources. She has been associated with the Talent Industry for a while. She enjoys sharing her experience with others.