Trust Based Cultures
written by Louise Phelan, The Culture Group
You can forget how powerful it is to be facilitating in person, as opposed to facilitating a virtual learning session. In person it’s so much easier to connect and engage and respond to individual needs and let’s face it, I really do love an audience! This week I had a fabulous time facilitating a rather fulsome conversation with an engaged group of individuals on the topic of trust-based cultures. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to each individual for their honesty and engagement and willingness to share their stories and their truths with their colleagues.
Leveraging the results of their 2021 Awareness and Engagement Survey, we explored the notion of our post Covid-19 hybrid workplace, which is asking our modern leaders to move away from ‘doing’ towards ‘influencing’ and in so doing, to focus on how to ‘be’, rather than what to ‘do’. This is often a confusing and sometimes confronting notion, that highlights the need to actively support our modern leaders to become comfortable with ongoing uncertainty and be curious in the face of the unknown.
The ensuing conversation on the absence of workplace trust and the impact this has on productivity and performance was steeped in emotion and compelling honesty. We agreed that when you really get down to it – a trust-based culture is the one that will allow you to be free to be your best self, truly connect with those around you and to operate as a valued member of your workplace community. To be honest, this was something that was appealing to everyone present! (I wonder why?) To add weight to our discussion, I shared some compelling statistics from studies undertaken by Paul J. Zak on the neuroscience of trust. These statistics show that people in high-trust companies were 74 % less stressed; 106 % more energetic at work; 50 % more productive; and 76% more engaged.
Hang on a minute. Did you say 50 % more productive? Really? 50%?
We reflected on the implications of this data for their own teams and were unanimous in our belief that Trust is the foundation for success in connecting organisational and team culture.
Our landing place was to come to collective agreement on the necessary environment to create a trust based culture in this workplace and to challenge ourselves with two, key change actions:
- What can we do as individuals, teams and an organisation to release more of the trust hormone, Oxytocin across our business and move towards our vision of a Trust based culture?
- Using the Authentic Culture Methodology developed by The Culture Group, which combination of the 5x Change Levers will we pull to create a sustainable difference?
