Trust

For the last 16 years I have either been a home based worker, or have spent a fair proportion of my time working from home with much of that remote working being from multiple locations, quite often not my home and I have seen first-hand how trust impacts the working output of managers, and teams alike.

Trust is required, but it doesn’t mean naivety or ignorance of what people are doing; there is a balance.  People often quote that trust is earned, if this was true we would never pay for a product before receiving it by post or a remote collection bay; trust is implicit.  As human beings we grow up learning to trust and our personal experiences influence the level of trust we are willing to extend, similarly the checks and balances we put in place to validate and monitor any trust we extend.

Continued trust is earnt and is built upon, it comes in many levels; would you give your child your ice cream cone to hold and not have a taste? Or leave your bags with a stranger in an airport while you run to the bathroom?  Each of these scenarios balance the value of what you are trusting against the level of existing or built up trust you have with the person to whom you are applying this trust, their ability to carry out the activity and your personal trust level.

A Dutch Proverb:

"Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on a horse."

This level of trust is palpable in the workplace on a daily basis, both in the old ‘office’ and in the new ‘virtual office’.  The teams that have seen growth in productivity are more than likely teams with a higher developed trust.  I refer to this as 360 trust; that is to capture the trust between peers, mangers and staff in all directions.  Trust is omnidirectional, a groups output will have a direct relation to both the inner and exterior trust afforded to them.

If you know me then you will know I am and have been for some time a Collaboration and Unified Communications subject matter expert.  You may wonder why I am writing about trust?  The reason I want to address trust is that no matter the type of business you are in, the size of your workforce, the technology you purchase and roll out or the locations you work in, without trust the ability to use communication and collaboration technology efficiently diminishes.  The changes we have seen in business operating practices from early 2020 have placed a greater onus on this trust as staff are no longer ‘visible’, the only indication you have to their availability or presence of an individual, is a green, orange or red icon next to their name how quick they reply to an email.  If you are a manager you may have more visibility through measured productivity or output, but ultimately you have to trust your staff are doing what needs to be done.

So having read that, what then is work and how is it measured?  If I was logged on for 8 hours have I worked enough, or if I have sent 100 emails, is that enough, how do we define what enough is when working from home compared to the office?  

If you can work from home, you know how much time you have been behind your laptop is not a measurement of your productivity, nor is the number of emails you have sent.  Your productivity is time spent creating results aligned to your function or purpose within an organization.  But regardless of the metric used to measure productivity, how do you know your staff are working to their maximum, and is it realistic to expect everyone to be at their desk or engaged 100% of the time; honestly no.  This is not how the real-world works, this is not how people work, and when we look at the next generation of workforce this is certainly not how they would like to think work is organized.

When you worked in an office, you sat at a desk, usually in a shared location and anyone could see you, walk past and know you were (a)there and (b)what you were doing (Remember quickly minimizing a social media app?).  Now people are working at home, you don’t know if they are there, you don’t know what they are doing, unless you are actually in a call with them, and yet we have heard reports of productivity increases.  The question I ask then is, has technology increased productivity, or was the potential already there but business practices limited the explosion of individual working conditions and flexibility?

My answer is both; the technologies we use today in the home working environments have been around for some time, what had not existed was the willingness by businesses to allow staff to operate ‘out of sight’.   If you have worked with large government organizations, a I have, you will know they can move at a glacial pace, and yet with the recent pandemic large teams which were considered office based became home-based in a matter of only weeks.  

Technology did not change, people did.

So back to the crux of this article, trust combined with the right technology allows businesses to become more efficient, more productive and to save costs.  True trust in an organisation will allow you;

… to do more, you are trusted to be in control.

… to achieve more, you trust your effort will be recognised.

… work to your productivity schedule; is it 4am to 9am or 6pm to 9pm, it is not 9-5 it is when you are productive.

… allows you to decide on your risk profile; others who trust you will understand if you fail.

Sometimes a small step of trust can lead to a larger trust envelope, allowing people to achieve more, by working to their rules, in their timeframe, but these people must also be provided with the tools to allow this creative freedom.  I have often referred to this as the Martini model and I apply it to my own way of working; I want to be able to work where I want, when I want, how I want.  This is not a demanding phrase more an ability requirement.  Should I find inspiration at 4 am then I want to be able to work; If I am on holiday and I have an idea, I want to be able to use my phone to connect and log my thoughts, then get back to holidaying.  Allowing secure access through the right tools to data, at any time from any place, allows an individual to be spontaneously productive.   We cannot set a time each week to be innovative, this hardly ever works; instead we need people to be able to collaborate and innovate when it is most effective for them.

When we employee people we pay them to carry out a job; by not trusting them we do not allow people to truly work, invent, create and take risks that lead to continued business improvement.

Trust as explained in this article is implicit, we will have ever more opportunities to extend and build trust within our organisations as extensive remote working and a larger percentage of an out of sight workforce has become the new normal.  More and more reports support the assumption that productivity would increase with people working from home, this has only been possible with the correct tools and level of trust in staff to do what is right.

Your decisions around Collaboration, Communication and Co-creation tools must change focus from an office centric nature to one that concentrates on the simplicity and flexibility for all users to operate safely and securely in any environment and at any time.