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Trust in the work
04 December 2023 Workplace Culture
Story by
Paul Devoy CEO, Investors in People
Paul Devoy, CEO, Investors in People reflects on his own company culture and how trust can help support employees in their best ways of working.
The term organisational culture has transformed from something perceived as a “fluffy” and poorly understood issue to being something that CEO’s regard as the key to maximising performance. Equally, when the latest corporate scandal hits the press, the root cause can often be traced back to something being fundamentally wrong with the culture.
In my view one of the most important aspects of culture is trust. There is an old Dutch saying attributed to Johan Thorbecke who was an influential Dutch politician from the 19th century – “Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback”. I believe the fundamental building blocks of an organisation, and any relationship for that matter, centres greatly around trust. This is equally as important for employers and employees, no matter how or where they work.
I have sought to reverse the Thorbecke approach. Trust is assumed and not earned for Investors in People employees. We measure people based on outcomes/outputs and not inputs. If you do your best work at 4am on a Sunday morning, then that’s fine. We have two simple heuristics or rules of thumb to manage that approach. How an employee organises their time cannot: –
- Be to the detriment of the excellence we expect in our customer service.
- Negatively impact upon how a colleague delivers on their objectives.
Other than that, our people can decide when they are going to be at their most productive to work. It’s not an easy option either as everyone has stretching objectives to achieve. The feedback from our people is that they appreciate working for an organisation where they are trusted and treated like adults.
The power of trust
When employees feel trusted and have confidence that they can go about their day-to-day job free from scrutiny and questioning, in our experience they are able to produce the best results, in return contributing to a positive workplace environment.
I think too many of our HR policies are based on the outliers. Most of the employees are covered by policies that are designed to deal with the small minority of people who can’t be trusted. I don’t think that creates a positive culture.
Instead, I would recommend a culture of radical trust where it’s assumed that the vast majority of people can be given the autonomy to balance their own needs with that of the organisation. Have simple heuristics to set the parameters and measure people on stretching outputs and outcomes.
It’s working for us as all our performance metrics has significantly improved since we implemented this approach. Despite being a fully remote organisation post-pandemic, our senior leadership team and myself as CEO have still ensured that the highest levels of trust in our workforce are upheld and one of the biggest ways of doing this, is by sharing our organisations visions and successes with the rest of the team.
I have also started to implement and research into OKR’s (objectives and key results), which are a goal setting methodology that help teams set measurable goals for themselves. Whilst the majority of organisations set ‘goals’ these aren’t always communicated properly and by communicating thoroughly, a ‘we’re all in this together’ bond is created throughout.
Creating and sustaining a strong company culture through trust, can also be maintained by following through with commitments and promises and being respectful of boundaries, viewpoints, and other opinions.
Investors in People recently hosted the first of two growth planning sessions, which brought over 30 members of our team together under one roof. Giving them a voice and a platform to express their views on how the organisation can grow internally and for its community, it was evident to see how open communication and collaboration between every employee and every team in the organisation is bringing out the best results.
As a business leader, to know that I can trust and fully connect with my team is incredibly empowering. At our organisation, from the marketing manager to the events lead, the apprentice, and the account managers, we all collaboratively come together to ‘Make Work Better’ in order to serve our community, and as an organisation that works to provide the very best accreditations in people management with trust as one of its core values, we will continue to practice what we preach internally and externally.