 Why is trust important in the workplace? Getting employee trust is an essential step to building a team. Teams outperform groups of individuals hands down. When you build trust within your team, the working environment becomes much more enjoyable for all. Team members look out for each other, help each other and tackle problems together. All these benefits increase the team performance and reduces staff turnover, reducing the cost of recruiting and training new staff. Every company wants better performance for lower cost. If you are the manager delivering this, what would the company do for you? I don't think you can employ tricks or short-term tactics in winning the team's trust at work. Booking in days of team building, exercises and trust building exercises rarely moves the trust dial much. Building trust takes work, being genuine, showing who you are and it doesn't happen overnight. I'm sharing seven ways to gaining employee trust, that encourage trust with your team in the short-term and the long-term. Firstly, understand two different types of trust. Secondly, listen and act for gaining staff trust. Third, empowering your employees is trust and action. Fourth, consistency of action creates trust. Fifth, openness and transparency builds trust. Sixth, trust is created when leading by example. And then seventh, act for the benefit of your team to gain trust. All of the approaches I talk about need to be employed from the heart, from a genuine and honest desire to help and support your team members. If you approach them as techniques to employ for winning the team's trust, rather than seeking to build genuine two-way trust, they simply won't work. A manager needs the team's trust to enable their own success. A manager creates value through others, through their team. Their team's performance is a key way a manager's personal performance will be judged. To gain the trust of a team. A manager should lead the way and trust their team members first. My name is Jess Coles, and if you're new here, Enhance.training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below, as well as a video timestamps, so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. To start building trust in a team, you need to firstly understand two types of trust. Everyone is different, and we each place more value on one type of trust compared to the other. Two different types of trust in the workplace. Firstly, job-based trust. Job-based trust, or cognitive trust, is your trust in a person to do their job well, to undertake an activity and do it well. If this trust is important in teams, when everyone is relying on their teammates to do their tasks and jobs at least as well as themselves. And secondly, relationship-based trust. A relationship-based trust, or effective trust, is built on empathy, emotional connection and genuine feelings of concern and care. Our feelings about the other person's intentions, values and integrity all feed into this type of trust. Relationship trust in action is when, say, a friend has had a really bad day. You sit and listen without trying to fix the situation as they blast steam. Even though you had an amazing day, you won't breathe a word about it. A demonstration of putting their interests before yours. Building both types of trust are important in the workplace. Some place more value on the jobs-based trust, others on relationship-based trust. Who wants to follow a leader that is a liability in their job? Equally, who enjoys having a manager great at the technical side of their job, but who you don't trust to look after you in the slightest? In winning employee trust, you need to build both relationship and job-based trust. The second action is to listen and act for gaining staff trust. Listening to team members, that is hearing what they say, taking it in and understanding it is a demonstration that you value their ideas, input and solutions. Acting on at least some of these ideas is even more important. Acting on their ideas and input is a visible public vote of confidence and trust in them. The best way to kill off staff giving you ideas is to listen and do nothing. You will also kill off some trust by doing nothing. Listening to staff and visibly acting on their good ideas and solutions will build trust with the team members and demonstrate you care and value them. Listen and act. The third action to winning the team's trust at work is empowering your employees. Empowering staff is a demonstration of your trust of your employees. If you don't show your trust of your team members, why do you expect them to trust you? Extend trust to earn trust back. Trust your team members to do their job. Give them clear direction, set clear expectations and then stay out of their way. Don't, firstly, micromanage them, be overly controlling or check up on them every five minutes. Secondly, don't only set them tasks which limits them practicing their problem solving, organization and general thinking. Third, don't ignore their ideas, input or solutions. Do, firstly, stay out of their way so they can do their jobs. Secondly, delegate problems to those capable of solving them and delegate problems and coach those that can almost solve the problems. Third, do ask for their opinions, ideas and solutions and act on them. Fourth, ask them for their help to solve problems relating to their areas or impacting the broader team. Fifth, invite them into group problem solving or planning sessions. There are so many ways that you can empower employees and show team members that you value them, respect their skills and want to hear their ideas. Fourth, is consistency of action creates trust. In any leadership position consistency is a big deal in creating emotional safety and trust with your employees. Humans love patterns. Our brains are wired to recognize and use patterns as it saves our brains a lot of energy. And patterns are also key in our survival mechanisms. Creating consistent patterns creates psychological safety. In contrast, I watched a leader at work one day give a prize publicly to one of his team members and then about three weeks later suddenly fire that same person. What message did that set of actions send to everyone in that leader's team? I had several very worried, afraid people talked to me about it afterwards. Consistency of actions, decision making and behaviors all build trust. Employees know in a given situation the action that you as a manager will take is likely to be X or something close. This consistency extends psychological safety to your employees and builds trust in you because they know what to expect. Fifth, openness and transparency builds trust with employees. In the workplace being open and transparent allows employees to form their own opinions based on the same information that you're looking at. When they reach the same or similar conclusions and agree the action you plan makes sense you start gaining staff trust quickly. I spoke to the owner of a very unionized business in a declining sector. There was a lot of distrust between the union and the management. The union was pushing for higher pay. Management was trying to keep the business alive. As soon as management opened the books showed the workers in the union the finances, the budget and talked through their plans all the animosity and distrust dropped away. Both management and workers started working as a team for the first time in decades. So regularly share with your team first the financial targets and progress against them for both the company and the team. Secondly talk through what is happening in the company why it will help hit targets Third discuss the problems and challenges being faced by the team and the business. Fourth explain everyone's responsibility on the team and who is doing what and why. Fifth tell the team your personal thoughts and views when appropriate rather than just repeating the corporate messaging. Being open and transparent is incredibly powerful to building trust with your team. Sixth trust is created when leading by example. As a leader or manager what you do is in the spotlight all of the time every action, decision and behaviour are observed by staff members and it impacts their trust of you. How you treat team members and colleagues impacts their trust of you. Create trust by living the same rules you are asking your staff to live by. Being open and transparent shows that you are accountable in the same way that you are asking your staff to be. Work to hit your personal targets as well as helping the team overall hit their targets. Treat others how you want to be treated give them the trust and respect that you want back in return. In short lead by example and do this consistently day in and day out to build a trust with employees. Seventh act for the benefit of your team to gain trust. One of the most powerful ways for how to build trust within your team that I know is visibly working hard to help your team. A few suggestions. You firstly deal with the problematic people and behaviours in the team. Secondly protect the team from distractions, politics, low value requests and the games other managers play. Third create clear direction and keep yourself and the team focused on that direction. Fourth actively look for and remove problems that hamper your team members' efforts and success. Fifth work hard and broaden their experience. A big part of being a successful manager or leader is acting in service to your team. But actively and visibly using all the skills and experience at your disposal to help the team overall you are showing that you are doing your best your part in creating the team's success. Serving your team is a brilliant way of winning team trust. So in summary gaining employee trust and working out how to build trust within your team in a genuine open and empathetic way is incredibly important as a manager or leader. Without trust you don't have a team only a collection of individuals. A team will outperform a group of individuals any day. Your key job as a manager is to increase team performance. Encourage trust with your team using the seven actions that we have discussed. Building a higher performing team starts with building trust with your team and within your team. To recap we have been through these seven steps to gain the trust of your team. Firstly understand two different types of trust. Secondly listen and act for gaining staff trust. Third empowering your employees is trust and action. Fourth consistency of action creates trust. Fifth openness and transparency builds trust. And then sixth trust is created when leading by example and then seventh act for the benefit of your team to gain trust. If you have any questions on gaining employee trust how to build trust within a team please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.