Trust leadership: How to build trust in the workplace

We know that as a manager, you spend a lot of your energy building strong employee relationships with your team.

Strong relationships often result in better team member performance, less stress, and a better workplace experience. Overall, this type of “trust leadership” is the ideal way to build trust in the workplace.

But, you cannot have strong relationships if your team doesn’t see you as a trustworthy leader.

Without your team’s trust in management, your role becomes difficult, and a sense of self-doubt can interfere with your ability to manage effectively.

According to Officevibe’s Pulse Survey data, 86% of employees trust their direct manager.

86% of employees using Officevibe trust their direct manager

We want you to become part of that number by helping you to spot the signs that determine whether your team trusts you to manage them effectively or not, and show you how you can measure trust accurately.

Let’s take a deeper look into why trust is important in leadership.

Building trust as a leader: How to identify if your team members trust you

Are you a trustworthy leader? Are you actively building trust among your team members? These questions can only be determined in 2 steps:

1. A self-reflection of your team’s behaviours towards you as their manager (i.e. self awareness)
2. A metric evaluation of workplace trust

Self-awareness reflection: spot symptoms of mistrust on your team 

The first step to determine if you have a trusting relationship between you and your employees is to self-reflect.

Symptoms that show high or low levels of workplace trust:

Let’s run a quick diagnosis together. Take a few minutes to think about team dynamics. Reflect on the following scenarios and focus on your employees’ behaviors:

1- How do they respond to organizational changes? 

2) Do they ever say “no” to certain things or challenge your ideas?

3) Do they let you know about mistakes or when things go wrong?

4) Does your team bring in new ideas?

5) Do they give you honest feedback?

Results…

Behaviours A) reflect indicators and symptoms that show a lack of trust, while behaviors B) are indicators of trust. What are your results showing?

As we can see, building trust in the workplace is a complex interpersonal aspect of your leadership and role as a manager. Spotting the symptoms that show a lack of trust in the workplace is step one.

However, let’s not stop here. A self-reflection exercise is a great place to start, but action is much more impactful when it comes from your team’s feedback. If you really want to know if your team trusts you, you’ll have to ask them directly.

Questions to evaluate levels of trust in management

Trust in the workplace is a metric that is measurable with the right set of tools.

At Officevibe, we believe it’s essential for managers to measure workplace trust and employee trust on an ongoing basis. This lets you quickly uncover any gaps in your efforts in building a trusting relationship with everyone in your team and any areas where trust might have been broken.

It might even shed light on the source of some of your team’s behaviors (such as low team performance or a decrease in employee engagement).

Here are some science-based survey questions to ask your team in order to determine your employees’ trust levels. Note that some questions appear on a sliding scale.

Pro tip: Offering your team anonymity allows them to be able to answer truthfully. This is key if you want to accurately measure their level of trust in you. Tools like Officevibe’s Pulse Survey software offer your team a safe space to share honest feelings and thoughts.

8 ways to build trust with your employees and in your workplace

1. Create open lines of communication

Open communication helps you know employees’ daily realities and shifting needs. It also helps you spot the places where they need support, visibility, or a new approach.

2. Practice transparency and visibility

Keeping your team in the dark about important information can result in a lack of trust, especially when it comes to big changes in your organization. The more pertinent information they have, the less anxious they will feel, and the more they will trust you.

3. Offer trust by default

Trust building goes both ways, and if you want your employees to trust you, you need to show that you trust them. When employees are empowered to leverage their strengths and expertise, it gives them the autonomy to do what they do best.

4. Own mistakes and failures

Mistakes are inevitable and often offer a big learning opportunity. Taking responsibility shows that you are just as human as the rest of the team and that there is always room for improvement.

5. Allow yourself to be vulnerable

To be vulnerable is to be human. Allow yourself to be yourself, to say when you are confused, or when you don’t have all the answers. For managers, being vulnerable sets an example to their team and betters collaboration.

6. Over-communicate your trust

Sometimes all it takes is to remind people that you trust them. A simple act of direct communication can empower your team to feel equipped to do their job.

7. Practice deep listening skills

A big part of trust is to feel like your team can talk to you. Practice deep listening so that you hear your team in a truthful and real way.

8. Build a culture of feedback through employee engagement

A feedback culture allows employees to have a voice, feel in control of their environment, and ultimately be heard by their leaders. This ensures that they are active participants in the betterment of their own careers and in your development as a manager.

When you build strong foundations of trust in the workplace, your team will align around the central mission of their roles and put their best foot forward, so everyone can reach success—together. 

The positive impact of building trust with employees

If after self-reflecting and asking your team you realize that there is in fact a lack of trust, you need to take immediate action.

👉 According to our data, whether your team trusts you as their manager or not, will highly influence your working relationship with them.

Just think about a personal experience: Have you ever had a manager you couldn’t trust? What about a manager you trusted fully? How much did this impact your work? 

As a manager, it’s essential that you prioritize trust with your team from the outset, and then continue to nurture that trust most especially through times of change and growth. Learning to maintain trust is just as important as building trust.

The benefits of trust leadership and being a trusted leader

Here are a few examples of how building trust with your employees can help improve team morale and reach organizational goals.

• Establishing trust in the workplace helps with handling change.
• Trust has the potential to decrease stress by 74% and burnout.
• Teams that trust their managers have a 76% higher level of employee engagement.
• Trust in the workplace enables creativity and innovation.
• Trusting relationships are at the base of successful difficult conversations.

Given the above reasons, if trust is broken in your team, it’s time to focus on improving it.

We developed strategies you can implement to take action and build trust with your team.

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