At the workplace, you have assigned a high-priority work to 3 teams who have to work in collaboration to offer a high-quality product to the client. However, there is a lack of trust between the teams and individual team members. As a result, while the product was delivered on time, it was not effectively created due to lack of communication and collaboration – trust!

Assuming that this was a development project, so the UI developers, software developers, testing, and operations team had to collaborate. Due to lack of collaboration (Read: Trust), the development team took all the time to create the project but no time was given to test it. The testing team did not go and clear the requirements first.

In between this mismanaged system, the product was delivered and the client was unhappy. Your business ended up losing the project and the HR was called upon to look into the situation.

The answer to the problem is outdoor activities. While the HR managers continuously execute activities that can improve the trust between employees, it is rarely effective due to lack of outdoor activities.

Consider this activity:

You have organized an office outing wherein everybody has to play a game. In this game, one employee will fall backwards trusting that his colleagues will catch him.

Trust is a collaborative effort which developed with three ingredients:

1. Problem-solving element.
2. And the bond.

While problem-solving in the above case is how I can do it, communication is requiring help in doing it, and bond is appreciating the help.

Let’s move ahead and understand how trust is intertwined to several business activities:

It Is Tied to Your Brand

Trust is ingrained in your brand value. There are basic elements that help your employees trust you from the starting. For example, the way HR communicates, on-boarding processes, and communication. So, this is to say that your employees already have an idea of whether if they can or cannot trust before they join. Once they join, you can either prove them right or wrong.

Moving forward, you can take this experience to the positive side and help your employees trust you and other company stakeholders.

Every Day You Have to Work to Build Trust

Each day, everybody in the organization is expected to build a trusting environment. Although one employee may be unhappy with a decision that the manager has taken, he or she still should believe that it is for the best. That is where trust starts and creates a positive environment even in negative situations.

For example, you are a startup and you would not be able to dispatch employee salaries for another week due to delayed client payments. You can talk to your employees, be true to them, and deliver a promise of assured payment.

This is not as easy as it sounds because as noted, trust is an everyday task. If you have not built it over the years or months, it is likely that your employees won’t understand your situation.

Losing Trust Is Not the End

Once you lose trust, it may be harder to build it again but it is not impossible.

While in some cases, it may be impossible to build trust but that is just the scenario where you have neglected employees for a very long time.

In all the other cases, you can rebuild it. Rebuilding trust will take a lot of time, communication, and efforts. But it is possible.

It is necessary to remember that a major element of rebuilding trust is an apology – a sincere one. Whether it is an issue between employees, teams, or with the organization, a sincere apology is always well accepted. So, that is where you should start. Apologize and then react.

Conclusion

An environment of trust in the workplace goes a long way. Why? Because it is the building block of every relationship, whether personal or professional. It is not possible to work with an employer you don’t trust and it is not possible to hire an employee you don’t trust. Eventually, untrusting relationships break and cause more damage. Hence, it is really important for HR to harbor a trusting relationship with the employees and among the employees. To achieve these, read the above tips.