5 Ways to Build Trust in Digital Workplaces
Workplaces don’t look how they used to 10 years ago. How do you build trust, when some employees live in different countries?
Workplace trust in today’s work environment looks different. With remote employment reaching 28% globally in 2023,1 and AI in the workplace becoming more common, guides on how to build trust need rewriting for hybrid and remote work relationships.
Employee trust is now more important than ever, as remote availability has made unhappy employees more comfortable to seek or even complete work from the comfort of their living room.2
So, how do companies go about building trust in modern professional settings? Read on for some tips, backed by research and practical insights for creating a positive workplace culture.
What is Trust in the Workplace?
First, some definitions. Workplace trust measures an employee’s ability to trust that their colleagues and superiors will actually do what they say they will, be honest, and keep everyone’s best interests at heart.
In professional settings, this mutual trust manifests as a complex interplay of both task-based and relationship-based elements—which we discussed before. In short, though, a track record of team members delivering on expectations and upholding mutual respect is essential to job satisfaction. So essential, in fact, that employees are 87% less likely to quit when they trust their workplace is committed to their wellbeing.3
However, the digital transformation of work has added another layer of complexity to building trust. As we’ll discuss, electronically-connected remote teams need to be more explicit about expectations during team meetings, have more open communication, and find new ways to demonstrate reliability and support virtually.
Why is Trust Important in the Workplace?
Why should companies adapt to raising workplace trust in the digital age? Simply put, profit and health.
There is a proven connection between lack of trust and burnout. A major cause of workplace burnout is feeling a lack of control and support in a work environment4—which is exactly what happens when a team feels they can’t rely on their colleagues or superiors in low-trust companies.
And burnout has links to organizational, psychological and physical issues. Issues that can drive down profits and increase employee turnover.5
On the other hand, high-trust companies report 74% less stress among employees and 50% higher productivity, alongside other benefits that constitute a better employee experience.6
This trust of colleagues and business leaders can also create psychological safety—something that Google's Project Aristotle found was the number one predictor of team success.7
For those unfamiliar, psychological safety is the feeling that employees can safely take interpersonal risks, like proposing new ideas, sharing information, challenging existing processes, and taking creative leaps that can lead to breakthrough innovations—without their failed ideas being mocked or leading to redundancy.
That means ideas can grow faster, iteration happens easier, and teamwork strategies are built quicker.
Which means products can get out faster, and less company time and money is spent on developing them.
Understanding the Root Causes of Trust Issues
Its importance is one side of learning how to build trust—the other is understanding what causes a lack of trust in the workplace.
Though we’ve covered it in our conflict management and difficult conversation guides, shorthand common factors for distrust include a failure to confront toxic behavior of employees and executives (45%), lying and non-transparency about company decisions and policies (43%), not responding to feedback (35%), and a reliance on overwork (32%).8
So, how can workplace cultures combat these factors?
Building Trust at Work: Five Effective Approaches
Consistent, Honest, and Open Communication
This is the foundation for workplace trust, and it’s easier than it sounds. We’ve discussed the importance of honesty in the workplace before, and it cannot be understated.
Being transparent about both successes and challenges, admitting mistakes when they occur, and maintaining open dialogue about expectations and outcomes raises employee trust, because it provides a sense of involvement and control over company direction.
Similarly, when communication remains honest, even in difficult situations, it creates a foundation of reliability that supports stronger professional relationships.
Ways to practically build this kind of communication include:
Regular and honest updates on company performance and direction
Clear ways for feedback to be provided and acknowledged
Consistent team meetings and check-ins so colleagues understand each other’s workflows and personal states
Regular casual meetings for employees and executives alike to bond, and increase psychological safety
These trust-building strategies also require good timing and delivery, including proper eye contact and body language.
In fact, try to make it in-person when possible: MIT research indicates that face-to-face communication is 34 times more effective than email for trust-building.9
Demonstrate Reliability through Action
Showing reliability is about more than making promises and meeting deadlines—it’s about establishing patterns of dependable behavior throughout all workplace interactions.
Whether it's arriving on time for team meetings, following through on personal commitments, or delivering quality work as promised, consistency in actions speaks louder than words in building trust.
The key to this is managing expectations effectively. As our guide to effective goal setting discusses, it’s essential to be honest and clear about work capacity and needs to ensure deadlines can be met. In fact, projects without clearly defined requirements are 37% more likely to fail.10
To demonstrate reliability in practice
Be honest, clear, and realistic about what can be delivered when, and what resources are required
Communicate when unforeseen issues are encountered
When in doubt, under-promise and over-deliver
Small things matter too—show up on time, remember small things about colleagues, &c.
Practice Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
We’ve discussed the importance of emotional intelligence in work environments before, so we won’t repeat ourselves too much.
Still, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and consider the impact of personal emotions, and others’ emotions, during a situation. Whether it’s building a new team, evaluating personal work, or diffusing an argument, it’s an essential soft skill.
In terms of trust, business leaders who show genuine concern for their team members' well-being and professional development create deeper connections that foster trust naturally, as mentioned.
Some tips to build emotional intelligence are below (but refer to our full guide for more):
Active listening, where others’ viewpoints are considered and engaged with
Recognizing and validating both personal emotions, and others’
Show appreciation for colleagues during celebrations and challenging times alike
Maintain Appropriate Boundaries
This might sound counterintuitive, but it’s important. Respecting not only personal boundaries, but those of colleagues, it’s not only essential for a healthy work-life balance but makes workplace teamwork itself more predictable.
A predictable work schedule makes it easier for others to understand their roles and responsibilities, set their own hours and deadlines, and trust that work is going well. All of this, according to research, leads to higher productivity, and thus profitability.11
The challenge lies in finding the right balance between accessibility and boundaries. Here are some tips:
Setting specific "office hours" for deep work, while ensuring colleagues know how to communicate urgent matters
Respecting others' boundaries and work styles, where possible
Communicating when boundaries cause a teamwork problem
Acknowledge and Learn from Mistakes
Admitting to and visibly learning from missteps is essential for building trust, because it shows employees they can trust mistakes will be discussed, and won’t cost them their jobs.
Creating this kind of company culture, where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities and not failures, also encourages the all-important growth mindset we’ve spoken about before. This makes employees much more comfortable with tackling new and difficult tasks, and much more likely to push for the results they want.
This, predictably, also boosts workplace psychological safety, with all the discussed benefits that brings.
However, such a culture requires consistent messaging and modeling from leadership. Here are some practical ways to create that:
Building a company culture of continuous learning
Owning up to mistakes, and showing what changes they’ve inspired
Focusing discussions on solutions and prevention rather than blame
Celebrating when improved processes or outcomes are successful
Rebuilding Broken Trust
Fixing trust that has been broken is infamously hard work, mostly because trustworthy attributes must be consistently displayed over time to build trust.12
The first step toward this is acknowledging the breach and its impact—denial or minimization of trust violations only deepens the damage.
For business leaders working to rebuild trust with employees after relatively small issues, the five above steps become crucial, with transparency becoming essential in particular. The key is demonstrating a commitment to change through consistent, visible actions through the methods above, rather than just words
When distrust has become systemic in a workplace, however, rebuilding trust must also become systemic. This includes not only acknowledging existing issues, but establishing new, clear communication protocols, and considering bringing in external mediators or consultants to facilitate healing.
The biggest thing to remember is building a culture of trust takes time, and it must be followed consistently and clearly throughout all of that time.
Practical Trust-Building Activities
Outside of the general tips above, practical activities can also accelerate trust building when implemented thoughtfully.
Predictable events like team retrospectives where successes and failures are discussed openly, and structured feedback sessions (which focus on growth rather than criticism) can all build familiarity and trust.
But, seemingly-trivial collaborative problem-solving and team-building exercises like puzzles, games ,and escape rooms are great ways for employees to build trust and teamwork abilities by supporting each other through non-work-related issues, and learning each other’s skills.
For virtual teams, these dedicated relationship-building activities become even more important. Research shows that remote employees collaborate effectively because they feel connected through frequent interaction, and a knowledge of each other’s personal lives.13
Dedicated informal meetings, for instance, have emerged as a powerful tool for team building in remote teams, with a study by Microsoft showing that teams who regularly engage in these casual virtual meetings report better job satisfaction and health.14
How Kin Supports Trust Building
While many virtual collaboration and meeting platforms aim to build workplace trust by making communication easier, our personal AI Kin has taken a different approach.
Kin is specially designed to help its users track and improve their relationships with themselves, their friends, their colleagues, and their schedule.
With its advanced memory capabilities, customizable empathetic conversation, and Journal feature, users can easily record their situation and the sources of their stress—which Kin then analyses to provide support, suggestions and Reminders around the clock.
This means that Kin’s assistance is wholly personalized—the AI studies a user’s individual work, life, and communication habits to provide insights into how they could be damaging trust-building efforts, and how they could improve them.
Because of this, Kin has a privacy-first design. All personal information is stored and processed primarily on the user’s device, with approved third parties used sparingly. Similarly, all sensitive data Kin has on a user is able to be viewed and deleted by them and only them—not even we can see it.
Get Started Today
If that sounds helpful, you can download Kin here, and create your first message to begin building trust at work with the prompt recipe below;
Introduce Yourself: Start the message by explaining who you are, where you work. The more you tell Kin, the more it can help.
What’s Happened?: Then, tell Kin why you need to build trust at work. Was there an argument? Is feedback ignored? Give Kin as much detail as possible.
Suggest Ideas: Now, share your potential solutions. A team meeting? An escape room? Tell Kin why you think some ideas are good or bad.
Check Back: Finally, let Kin know when you’d like to solve these issues by, and when you’d like to discuss progress in doing so. Kin can set reminders to keep you both on track!
Next Steps: Implementing Trust-Building Practices
As we’ve seen, building workplace trust requires consistent effort and attention. Before beginning, ensure it’s a commitment those involved are ready for.
Then begin by assessing current trust levels in the relevant professional relationships, and identifying areas for improvement.
Focus on implementing one trust-building approach at a time, in the most deprived areas first, allowing each practice to become natural before adding another.
Remember: trust builds gradually through consistent actions and genuine interactions.
As such, regular evaluation and adjustment of trust-building efforts is essential to continued progress. This might include seeking feedback from colleagues, monitoring the effectiveness of different approaches through tools like Kin, and adapting strategies based on what works best.
By doing this, there’s a good chance that workplace trust will increase, and the health and profit benefits it brings will follow.
Sherif, A. 2024. Employees working primarily remotely worldwide 2015-2023. statista.com. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1450450/employees-remote-work-share/ [Accessed 12/05/24]
Castrillon, C. 2024. ‘The Real Impact Of Return-To-Office Mandates On Productivity At Work’. forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2024/10/06/impact-of-return-to-office-mandates-on-productivity/ [Accessed 12/05/24]
Downey, S. et al. 2015. ‘The Role of Diversity Practices and Inclusion in Promoting Trust and Employee Engagement’. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45(1), pp. 35–44. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264162062_The_role_of_diversity_practices_and_inclusion_in_promoting_trust_and_employee_engagement [Accessed 12/05/24]
Anon. 2023a. ‘Breaking down burnout in the workplace’. mcpress.mayoclinic.org. Available at: https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/mental-health/breaking-down-burnout-in-the-workplace/ [Accessed 12/05/24]
Anon. 2023b. ‘Employers need to focus on workplace burnout: Here’s why’. apa.org. Available at: https://www.apa.org/topics/healthy-workplaces/workplace-burnout [Accessed 12/05/24]
Zak, P.J. 2017. ‘The Neuroscience of Trust’. hbr.org. Available at: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust [Accessed 12/05/24]
Duhigg, C. 2016. ‘What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team’. nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html [Accessed 12/05/24]
Anon. 2022. New Survey: Top 5 Reasons Employees Distrust Employers and Top 5 Why They Do. www.visier.com. Available at: https://www.visier.com/blog/top-reasons-employees-distrust-employers/ [Accessed 12/05/24]
Bohns, V. 2017. ‘A face-to-face Request Is 34 Times More Successful than an Email’. hbr.org. Available at: https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-face-to-face-request-is-34-times-more-successful-than-an-email [Accessed 12/05/24]
Bieg, D. et al. 2014. ManageMent a CoRe CompetenCy foR Project and PrograM SucceSS 2014 in-Depth Report PMI’s Pulse of the Profession: Requirements Management -A Core Competency for Project and Program Success. Available at: https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/requirements-management.pdf [Accessed 12/05/24]
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