Building Trust With Employees: 5 Crucial Steps

More businesses today want to build trust with their employees. Increased trust builds employee engagement, and when employees are more engaged at work, they are more productive, have lower turnover rates, and are more invested in the company—all of which is good for business.

One way to build trust is to improve your employee feedback program. Why? Because employee feedback programs are inherently reliant on trust: employees have to trust the company will take their feedback seriously, that there will be no negative repercussions for providing feedback, and that their issue will be resolved.

A McKinsey study found that “a positive team climate—in which team members value one another’s contributions, care about one another’s well-being, and have input into how the team carries out its work—is the most important driver of a team’s psychological safety.”

To improve your employee feedback program and build employee trust, here are steps to take.

5 steps to building trust with employees

1. Evaluate your current feedback channels

The first step to improving employee feedback is to evaluate the feedback channels that you currently have. Start your assessment by seeing which tools your employees are using and not using; keep the tools that are working and stop using the ones that are not generating any feedback. Then, see what other tools exist that you're not using. Examples might be digital platforms or anonymous channels. Whatever tools you add, make sure your employees will use them.

2. Establish business goals and build a strategy

Your next step is to manage the feedback after it's submitted. A surefire way to break employee trust is to spend time and resources building a new feedback program, only to have it fail the employees it's supposed to help. Implement a strategy that includes setting goals for sourcing feedback, choosing metrics to measure those goals, figuring out ways to ensure successful buy-in and adoption of your feedback methods, standardizing the reporting process, and making feedback part of your company culture.

3. Get employee buy-in

You will now want to get employees involved in the process by providing you with feedback on your feedback tools. This will not only give you a sense of what can be improved on, but you can also ask them about hurdles that may exist to reporting to gain insight into how to better source feedback. Having employees involved will not only increase buy-in and eventual adoption of your program, but it communicates that you're committed to the process, which will increase employee trust as well.

Dan Staley, HR Technology leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, believes that a big hindrance to adoption of a new tool or initiative is a disconnect between what tools leadership thinks will work and what tools employees will use.

4. Make it part of the culture

Employees are trusting you to create a safe workplace where they can bring their full selves to every day. They want to know that feedback is something that's being taken seriously, and that's built into the culture. Because of that, don’t just roll out new feedback initiatives and move on, but continue to talk about them whenever you can. This means bring them up at all-staff meetings and one-on-ones, list feedback options in the company newsletter, highlight stories about resolved issues, and include a link to feedback resources in your email signature.

5. Let employees know change is happening as a result of their feedback

Unfortunately, there are many hurdles to reporting, like fear of retaliation, not knowing if the incident was a serious enough issue to report, or not thinking anything will be done about it. This is why it’s key to not only communicate about what resources are available, but communicate when change happens as a direct result of feedback. If employees have to wait too long for a resolution, they may leave the company, or turn to social media or a lawyer to get some justice.

In addition to having a system in place to actively resolve reports, talk about when reporting brings about change in the culture to let employees know that their voices do matter, and that they do have a say in the workplace they come to every day. Psychology Today reports that when employees are aware that their contributions make a difference, their job satisfaction and productivity increases.

Building trust one feedback report at a time

The task of building employee trust can be daunting, but you can improve trust by taking specific and measurable actions to improve your employee feedback program. You’ll not only increase trust as you follow through on each report, but you will create a safer, happier work environment.

RELATED: Employee Feedback Programs: How HR Departments Can Overcome the 3 Most Common Challenges