Building Collaboration and Trust in the Workplace with Dan Schawbel
Laurie Ruettimann
Trailblazing author, career advisor, speaker, podcaster, and leader. ? Top LinkedIn Learning instructor in leadership and HR. ? Still trying to fix work.
In this episode, I am joined by Dan Schawbel. He’s a New York Times bestselling author and the managing partner of Workplace Intelligence, a research and advisory firm helping HR adapt to trends, drive performance and prepare for the future.
Dan and I discuss workplace trust and how we can better build it within organizations. Listening to employees and building connections encourages employees and helps them get behind a company’s vision of success.
Listen to this episode to understand the foundations of collaboration and trust in the workplace.?
Punk Rock HR is proudly sponsored by UKG. They are an award-winning all-in-one HR platform. If you’re curious and want to fix work and do HR better, check out our sponsors at UKG.com .
Download my white paper “The Way Forward: A Look at Post-Crisis Work Life ,” created in partnership with UKG.
Building Workplace Trust by Listening to Employees
While trust looks different in every organization, the foundations of trust are built on three things: integrity, values and communication.
We live in a time when organizations are able to engage with their employees in more ways than ever before. Slack, video conferencing, surveys, one-on-one meetings and other daily interactions all provide organizations with an opportunity to learn more about how their employees define, value and evaluate trustworthiness -- and act on it.
Despite the many opportunities for leaders to establish trust with their employees, it’s still possible to lose it all in a single moment.? Dan highlights the relationship between trust and branding. “You could spend decades building a brand and then make one mistake, and your reputation is destroyed. And I think it’s the same with building trust as a leader.”
As part of a study on employee trust with UKG, Dan interviewed the CEOs of Netflix, Whole Foods, and other companies early on during COVID-19. Dan wanted to know their feelings on trust because the employee's voice is just as important as the voice of the customer.
Key questions included: What do my employees need right now? What do they expect today? And how will I respond and take action based on those needs, demands and requirements?
Building Trust in the Workplace?
I wanted to hear about some of the great organizations finding a way to attract and retain talent. So many companies simply whine that they can’t.
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Today might be “the best job market in our lifetime,” Dan says. “Over 15 million Americans have quit their jobs this year so far. Match that with about 11 million unfilled jobs in America, which is the highest in my career. Since I’ve even been paying attention to this. It’s astronomically high. And so that’s why they call it the Great Resignation.”
Companies are paying attention, too. Dan gave a clear example by discussing Walmart’s behavior. Walmart announced that two-thirds of their hourly workers are going to become full-time workers with benefits. “To me, that is like a symbol of change. It’s a symbol of a completely different economy that we’re in this year versus last year. Minimum wages have gone up. You have a lot of people over the past year who are burned out.”
Walmart isn’t the only company reimagining how they support their employees. Another example of listening and implementing is Citigroup. The financial services firm is allowing remote work two days a week and has added a Zoom-free day. If a 100,000-person organization can do it, anyone can. According to Dan, this is a topic every company should be considering for the future of their organization. “We really need to support our employees now because it's not just talent that is their greatest asset. It's more than that. It's the cost of replacing this talent. We can't afford not to do something about it.”
Building a Sense of Community
I ask Dan about the future of work. What are some of the trends that business leaders and HR professionals should look out for?
Dan explains that the first thing an organization needs to do to establish trust. “They have to encourage people to continue to work there and get behind their vision to succeed.” One of the primary ways Dan sees leaders building trust is their openness to flexibility for their workforce. Giving workers opportunities to control aspects of their workflows allows them to prioritize their needs and feel more secure, and this trend is here to stay, says Dan.?
However, people tend to have short memories, and it is crucial not to forget what we’ve learned during the pandemic. “I think the thing that I most fear is that when we get into this new normalcy fully, and it becomes safer to go back to the office and people feel more secure ... that people will forget about what we experienced.”
At the same time, we have to keep the mental health of our employees at the forefront. Technology is both good and bad, as Dan puts it. Isolation and loneliness can happen to anyone, and remote workers experience it at a higher rate. Companies must get in front of what could turn into a “burnout epidemic.”
How do we ensure that we carry trust and connection with us into the future? Dan puts it nicely: “It’s overemphasizing being human in a digital world.”