How do you build a climate of trust at work? With Great Place to Work, Swile and Figures

How do you create a company culture built on trust? The question is as much about the “employer-employee” relationship as it is about the bonds between colleagues. What scope and what definition can we give to trust within a company? And which effective practices should be put in place to give it pride of place?

To offer a few answers,  we are sharing the perspectives of Tiphaine Galliez (Innovation Manager at Great Place to Work), Jérémie Sicsic (Head of Content at Swile) and Virgile Raingeard (Founder of Figures). All three led the talk “How do you create a company culture built on trust?” during the WEEK OF TRUST organised by Morning in May 2021. A perfect opportunity to share a summary of the ideas raised that day.

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“Organisations will need to place ever greater importance on fairness and inclusion.” (T. Galliez)

Tiphaine Galliez has been working at Great Place to Work for six years now. Fully committed to quality of life at work, she places particular importance on trust within organisations.

Trust is a rich notion that can encompass many parameters. Tiphaine usually starts from the definition set out by Denise Rousseau in 1998: “Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behaviour of another.”

Echoing this definition, the team at Great Place to Work — supported by researchers from Stanford — has identified five dimensions of trust, namely: credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. Depending on the era, some dimensions take on more or less importance.
In the early 1990s, employees needed to communicate with their manager, and the challenge was to gain clarity. Other themes then took centre stage: a sense of belonging first, followed by the need for camaraderie with the emergence of the famous  table-football years. Today, the stakes revolve around fairness and inclusion. It is the organisations that fly these values high that will inspire the greatest trust among employees.

To boost trust within organisations, Tiphaine recommends the three areas of work put in place by Great Place to Work:
- creating a reassuring managerial foundation: open mic, live chat, listening to employees’ needs through regular surveys, and support from therapists.
- developing a framework that fosters inclusion by putting employees in a position to work on cross-functional projects. Within the Itelios teams, a “hybrid” working group thus created the recruitment processes.
- setting up a learning system that allows employees to talk about their projects and their innovations. The organisation must do everything it can to break down limiting beliefs and make available the resources, time and budget to support this.

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“Companies must place a feedback culture at the heart of their practices.” (J. Sicsic)

Jérémie Sicsic, Head of Content at Swile, is also the founder of Brick, an app specialising in employee engagement.

For Jérémie Sicsic, the notion of trust is closely tied to that of engagement. This conviction is based on the results of a survey — conducted in October 2020 by Swile — aimed at understanding the drivers of employee engagement during COVID-19. Among the findings, the survey revealed five drivers of engagement, chief among them a climate of trust. This major piece of the puzzle is itself made up of three ingredients:
- Supportive management: measures trust in one’s manager, the ability to show vulnerability, how mistakes are handled…
- Transparency and leadership: measures the relationship between employees and management, the degree of communication…
- Team cohesion measures the quality of relationships between employees and their degree of communication…

For Jérémie, the manager is the key to establishing a climate of trust. To achieve this, they must drive a feedback culture — both positive and negative. The founder of Briq points out that there is nothing worse than receiving no feedback after completing a task, because feedback means improvement. But it still has to be done properly.
All too often, feedback focuses on the result — as if that were the only measure of performance. But to build lasting performance, you need to place greater value on the way things are done. The criteria to consider are more about behaviour within a project team or the way of working. It is up to each person, of course, to pin down exactly what those criteria are.

☞ Read also: The 5 sins of feedback, a LinkedIn op-ed by Jérémie Sicsic.

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“Trust is a matter of psychological safety. Your employees need to feel that they are allowed to get things wrong!” (V. Raingeard)

Virgile Raingeard spent 12 years as an HR director in large groups and smaller organisations. He is now HR director at Figures, a start-up that aims to aggregate compensation data in order to better advise companies on the subject.

Through his experiences, Virgile has come to see that trust is a matter of psychological safety. This notion refers to the ability of a team or an individual to anticipate a risk or serious consequences following an initiative. In practical terms, it is about the implicit rules and norms governing what is and isn’t done. Having the right to make mistakes means being able to get things wrong when the rules of the game are not known in advance. To keep innovating and to work together, mistakes are inevitable. Everyone must therefore be able to get things wrong, with peace of mind.

The importance placed on trust naturally varies a great deal from one company to another, depending on their culture. He cites Comet as an example, where a public post-mortem culture is common practice. Members of management routinely share their mistakes and their improvement processes publicly. In doing so, they normalise getting things wrong. A leader who admits their mistake helps create a supportive climate and turns the “employee-employer” balance of power on its head,  showing that everyone is allowed to make mistakes.

Virgile of course agrees with the suggestions made by Tiphaine and Jérémie to boost trust within organisations. He adds another recommendation to this arsenal, one rolled out through creative workshops bringing together employees from different fields. He cites companies such as Selectia and CP2i, which called on Art Work In Promess to run artistic workshops between employees. The aim? To spark reflection and refresh the way different subjects are viewed. A word to the wise!

To watch or rewatch the talk in full, along with all those from the Week of Trust ☞ the RECAP.

Read also: Offboarding: turning the end of a story into a fresh start!