4 Ways to Gain Your Employees’ Trust

This article comes from Entrepreneur.

4 Ways to Gain Your Employees’ Trust

Here’s how to foster better trust between senior leadership and employees:

1. Create a culture of transparency.

The basis of trust is being clear and honest. However, all too often, what executives do is shrouded in mystery. Open communication prevents that from happening. Embracing transparency leads to more trust in leadership.

Keep managers and employees informed about what’s going on at your company. Let them know about changes that affect their jobs and the reasoning behind those changes. Knowing how executives make decisions leaves no room for doubt about their motivations.

2. Develop managers.

Distrust from employees often stems from their not seeing themselves supported at work. They feel stressed and overwhelmed, and over time they begin to think the organization doesn’t care about them.

Better equipping managers is the best defense here. With proper support, employees won’t feel that their needs are being ignored by the organization. Provide managers with continual training so they can guide employees, and make them feel comfortable and confident at work.

3. Give employees a voice.

Trust goes both ways. If leaders want employees to trust them, they need to trust their workforce, listen to those individuals’ opinions and respect their knowledge base. Unfortunately, most employees feel that their ideas fall on deaf ears.

Create a formal avenue for employees to voice their thoughts and ideas. Recognize that just saying there’s an “open door” policy at your company isn’t enough. Set a time each week when employees can meet with executives and talk.

4. Connect performance metrics at all levels of the company.

One of the best ways to close the gap between employees and leadership is to tie everyone’s work together. Employees already know and understand how their performance affects the company and its goals, but they don’t know how executives contribute.

Just as employees’ performance should be regularly evaluated, also assess how executives are doing. Share the results with the entire company so leaders are held accountable for their work. That will reassure employees that nothing is being hidden from them.

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