Access Management Journal - March 2009 - (Page 23) CHAA Corner Creating a Trusting Environment in Your Workplace By Jody Urquhart Encourage your employees to share information, accept mistakes, and exchange ideas to learn and grow as a supportive, trusting team. A Symphony of Trust How much do you trust your staff and why does it matter? Trust affects your entire business, as the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat clients. If it’s acceptable that an organization or manager doesn’t have to keep promises, then you can guarantee employees won’t keep promises to clients, either. People do business with those they trust. A client’s trust in an organization reflects an organization’s trust in its employees. Lance Secretan states in Reclaiming Higher Ground, “Our society is suffering f rom truth decay.” He holds that, especially in teams, telling the truth is essential to good business. “If the members of a symphony lie to each other, they will play awful music,” he maintains. So it goes in any team environment. Telling the truth is efficient. More than a third of an organization’s budget may be devoted to administrative functions such as controls, reports, and procedures. Many controls exist because management doesn’t trust employees. What if we could nix some of these controls and trust each other to do our best? It would be much less expensive and much more efficient. Defining a Trusting Workplace When I speak to organizations about creating trust in the workplace, these are the most common observations participants shared about trustworthy companies and individuals: “She has never let me down.” yy yy “They do what they say they will do.” y y know the organization has my best interests in “I mind.” 23 Volume 33, Number 1 yy “He knows what he’s talking about and admits it when he doesn’t.” How to Build Trust Through Information Imagine your first day on the job in a new organization. As you walk in the door, you notice rooms that are off-limits to everyone but the manager. Day after day, you see that information is carefully guarded and watched. Meetings occur behind closed doors. Managers walk around, and you sense they know something you don’t. Does this sound like a fun and productive work environment? In these settings, employees guard information carefully. Information is often seen as intellectual property for both the organization and for those who develop it. People put effort into creating information and ideas and start to take ownership of them. In doing so, it becomes territorial and guarded. Pretty soon, a wedge develops between those who have access to information and Continued on page 24. Exploding the Trust Myth: “We Trust Each Other” Many organizations think that trust isn’t a concern. On the surface everything is fine, but on closer inspection you might discover that employees seek to satisfy only their basic, immediate needs. Their passion is lost in the details of the job, and over time, working in such an atmosphere precipitates lethargy for some, and for others, illness.
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