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Team Discusses Building Trust in the Workplace
Engagement
2 Min Read

7 Ways to Build Trust in the Workplace: Paul Zak Webinar Recap

15Five

Earlier this year, I started reading a book called Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies by neuroscientist Paul Zak. The book is full of fascinating insights and statistics about how to build trust in the workplace and how we as humans view and perform work. It occurred to my team and me: If trust is a crucial component of a high functioning workplace, what relationship does it share with employee engagement? How do the two go hand-in-hand?

We invited Zak to join Emplify CEO and Co-Founder Santiago Jaramillo and Senior Employee Engagement Strategist Michael Vasey in a recent webinar to discuss what conditions foster engagement in the brain, how companies can replicate it, and what benefits trust and employee engagement have on business outcomes. What we discovered were 7 Simple Ways to Improve Employee Engagement Through Trust:

  1. Celebrate victories (recognition)
  2. Build intentional relationships (community)
  3. Invest in professional and personal growth (educate)
  4. Delegate generously (defer authority)
  5. Stop accounting for vacation time (rest/wellness)
  6. Crowd-source deliberations and decisions (listen)
  7. Share financials (transparency)

The biggest takeaway from the webinar? However you slice it—trust, employee engagement, culture, community—success in the workplace is all about valuing people. The people around you are the most important thing to your organization hands-down. The thing is, they have choices, and they can choose to work elsewhere. They can either be highly engaged at your company or highly disengaged. Understanding the drivers of their engagement and what makes them go the extra mile is an effective way to create a workplace where people willingly volunteer their extra effort for the good of the company.

At face value, these directives may seem like they don’t make sense for your organization or they’re not the way you’re used to doing things. With context from three panelists, they become easy no-brainers that you can implement going forward to build trust in the workplace and boost engagement for a thriving culture—and bottom line.