How to build trust with your staff, as a topic, occupies the minds of most serious managers and leaders. To add to, managers who inspire trust, both in themselves and in the organisation, display better job performance. As well, they have more committed employees and stronger networks, than those who do not inspire trust. Additionally, they create a work environment staffed by employees who demonstrate heightened emotional stability, self-control, creativity and flexibility. Hence, building trust with your staff boosts the managerial and organisational effectiveness. We tend to exhibit trust when we attribute good intentions to and have confidence in the words and actions of others. Cultivating the following actions enables you to build trust with your staff.
1. Demonstrate Competence At What You Do
Find opportunities in your everyday work life to show your people what you are good at.
2. Model The Values That Are Important To You
Your staff will pay attention to what you say if they are convinced that you stand for something beyond self-interest.
3. Be Accessible To Your Staff
It pays to communicate regularly with your people. By providing ongoing information, status reports, and feedback, you enhance your standing with your staff. Keeping employees informed of decisions and the processes by which decisions are made works well here. For a fact being accessible contributes to bringing alive the substance of how to build trust with your staff.
4. Engage In More Positive Interactions With Your Staff
To build familiarity and understanding with your staff, you need to have more positive contacts with them.
5. Allow Your Staff To Voice Their Opinions
Employees who feel listened to and who believe that their opinions are taken seriously are more likely to trust their manager. Moreover, they will demonstrate greater commitment to the organisational goals and the manager’s decisions.
6. Show Consistent And Predictable Behaviour
For your staff to know what you want and accept you as authentic, you must avoid arbitrary and abrupt changes in behaviour. A bent for erratic behaviour increases the anxiety of your staff and erodes their trust in you.
7. Offer Unsolicited Help
To listen and help your staff to solve their problems, proves useful in numbering you among the trustworthy. This is especially so when the help is unsolicited and when you offer it at some cost to you. Taking your staff’s needs into account when making decisions also contributes to the trust they have in you. In truth, offering unsolicited help touches on the discipline at core of how to build trust with your staff.
8. Let Your Attitude Reflect Your Understanding And Consideration For Your Employees
Sure enough, respecting style and cultural differences among your staff gets you forward with them to achieve a meaningful end. Recognising their need to take care of their family obligations also serves to increase their trust in you. A simple gesture of appreciation from you, helps to improve your footing with your staff. Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, once asserted that he uses Tuesdays and Thursdays to thank his people.
9. Define Clear Goals, Job Expectations, Standards And Performance Measures
When you fulfil your staff’s desire to know how they create value in the organisation and the contents of their job description, you strengthen the trust they repose on you. Outlining the evaluation criteria and the consequences of certain behaviour gives a boost to this trust.
10. Empower Your Staffs To Control Their Work And Their Time
After setting clear job boundaries and performance expectations, give your staff the freedom, information, and training, to make many of their own decisions concerning the daily details of their work. Likewise, enable them to determine how to manage and create balance in their personal and work life. As you extend trust to your staff, they will return trust back to you.
11. Establish Predictable Routines
Shared routines, habits and rituals provide a good measure of reassurance to your employees. A safe haven of predictability provides feelings of stability and promotes cooperation among employees especially during periods of change.
How to build trust with your staff, as a subject, deserves your attention. Building trust with your employees promotes a sense of belonging that reduces staff turnover. As well, it motivates your employees to go beyond the call of duty.
