The future of trust
How trust in your organization can drive performance
Trust isn’t only critical to developing personal relationships, it’s also the heart of successful organizational strategies. To thrive in the new age of trust, companies should work to build trust equity every day. Doing so, however, will require making trust measurable.
Building trust equity to strengthen stakeholder relationships
Why does trust matter? We’ve entered the trust age: a time where (mis)information is omnipresent, individual perceptions reign supreme, and digital security and data privacy are constantly threatened. Now more than ever, stakeholders expect organizations to do the right things and do them well. These expectations range from entrusting an organization to safeguard one’s private data to requiring a company to have a strong stance on environmental, social, and governance issues. Despite this, many leaders and organizations still view trust as an abstract concept.
We believe that trust should be managed proactively because, when it’s prioritized and acted upon, it can become a competitive advantage. An organization that positions trust as a strategic priority—managing, measuring, investing in, and acting upon it—can ultimately build a critical asset.
What does trust mean within the context of your industry and sector? We work with organizations to capture the initial perception of trust within their walls, then determine if and how these perceptions differ across departments, business units, and/or geographies where they operate. We start to develop an understanding of what trust expectations exist in the eyes of different stakeholders.
The next step is making trust measurable. To that end, we’ve developed a set of trust measurement capabilities that measure:
- Actions an organization can take to elevate levels of trust
- Calculation of point-in-time levels of trust with key stakeholders
After collecting and analyzing data, the results are juxtaposed with industry and sector benchmarks, ultimately providing a detailed, quantitative assessment of trust, including gaps, strengths, and opportunities for that enterprise.
Once an organization is equipped with relevant data and is able to diagnose where trust gaps may exist, laying out a prioritized set of actions is essential. In an effort to determine what to act on first, we work with organizations, leveraging our research and benchmarking studies, to assist organizations as they prioritize the key areas of focus to help enhance, protect, and rebuild trust.
This part of the process is essential and, likely, the most difficult: changing the organization from within and determining whether a high degree of competence and the right intent are applied to the items that are deemed highest-priority, and seeing those changes through. Trust rises and wanes over time, so exploring, diagnosing, prioritizing, and acting on trust should become part of the DNA of every organization and repeated on an ongoing basis.
