Innovative Workplaces: Why Trust May Be the Missing Piece to Your Team or Organization’s Success

Join Loeb Leadership's culture and HR experts, Tamara Fox and David Robert, as they share their insights and strategies on how to create a positive and productive work environment that supports employee growth, engagement, and retention. During the webinar, you will learn: - What an intentional high-trust workplace culture is and why it matters. - Strategies for building a culture that aligns with your organization's values and goals. - How to create a culture of inclusion. - Best practices for fostering employee engagement, well-being, and growth. - Tools and techniques for measuring and improving workplace culture. Whether you're a business leader, HR professional, or anyone interested in creating a more intentional and impactful workplace culture, this webinar is for you!

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Tamara Fox: Hey, everybody. Happy to see you. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Tamara Fox and I am the head of consulting for Loeb Leadership. My background is in human resources consulting with a focus on the organizational development side. I'm joined today by David Robert, our co-CEO at Loeb Leadership. David, could you introduce yourself to our audience please?

David Robert: Sure. Thanks, Tamara. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning. As Tamara said, Dave Robert co-CEO at Loeb Leadership, was the previous head of consulting before we invited Tamara to join our team and I have extensive experience on this very topic on helping organizations think through what a culture shift could look like. And so I'm excited about this conversation.

Tamara Fox: Cool. And thank you everybody for joining us. Just want to remind our audience that we do have a Q and A, so please feel free to send in any questions throughout this webinar. We prefer that these are interactive, so do not hesitate to drop questions in. We'll make sure to answer those as we go.

Why Are We Here Today?

Tamara Fox: I wanted to share why we decided to do this topic and what brought us to this conversation today. So David and I both have spent years and years talking about workplace cultures and helping organizations develop and design what they want their workplace cultures to look like. And recently we've had an uptick in requests from clients asking to how to mitigate a lot of the chaos going on as far as returning employees to the office or building trust within their workplace or having issues with retention. And we've seen so many clients continue to ask questions of “why is this happening? What is going on?” And to us, it comes down to trust. Trust is the foundation when you're building your workplace culture. And wanted to talk more with our audience today about what that looks like. David, anything you want to share with our audience as to why we're here today?

David Robert: Yeah. Well, I know you know this to be true, Tamara, but we've actually seen an uptick in the number of conversations we're having with clients, who are deeply alarmed at the level of stress and burnout that they're firsthand experiencing or seeing in their workplace. And that was understandable during the pandemic. I mean obviously we all went through that, but you would think you would see some remediation now that we're kind of coming back to a new sense of normalcy. But actually the complete opposite is true. People are feeling more stressed out, more confused, more intimidated by ambiguity. And for me, when I hear those things, I immediately go to a trust issue. And before we went live on the broadcast, Tamara and I were having a conversation around what the new work environment could look like in the future. And it seems like the only ones who want to go back to pre-pandemic work environment are CEOs and managing partners.

And we see that in our society, these CEOs of large companies are demanding, amazon was the most recent one demanding the employees come back full-time in the office. And I think that I'm not scared to go out on the limb and say this, that it's not going to go back to where it was before. And so it's a really huge opportunity to really talk about trust and what does trust look like and how do you actually create an environment, a work environment, based on trust and still get your work done. Still get work done, and make your shareholders happy or your employees happy.

So yeah, for me, the aspiration is less important than the intention. I tend to default to trust. I'm biased. I've worked with Great Place to Work for a long time. These are practitioners on trust and culture. But some organizations, they want a culture of inclusion or culture of collaboration or respect. I like the trust concept because you can anchor so much to that. You can an anchor wellness. It's hard to have an environment of wellness if you don't trust each other. Healthy conflict in a low trust environment, every disagreement is unhealthy conflict, right? Inclusion, it's hard to be inclusive and to feel included if you don't trust the people you work with or work for. So there's so much positive things you can actually anchor this concept of trust, which is why I think it's an important topic.

Tamara Fox: One thing we want our audience to think about today while we're talking through these topics is think about your organization and your organization today, or your firm is telling a story. And what do you want that story to be? So David would love for you to share some examples of what these stories could look like from organizations that you've worked with and those roles that those individuals do play.

• What are some examples of "stories" that organizations tell?

  David Robert: I'm happy to. Well, let's sit on that concept for a moment because it's very rare that we have conversations with leaders at any level around this topic, around the story that you're trying to create because every organization's telling a story. You're absolutely right. And that story is influencing how people feel about where you work. And so what do you want that feeling to be? And so I know that when we're working with clients in the early stages of culture transformation or culture reshaping, it's the first question we ask is how do you want people to feel about your organization because once you have that question answered, everything you do from a leadership philosophy perspective, from a program and policy perspective should be anchored to that. So you're reinforcing that feeling rather than confusing it. But oftentimes we skip over it, we skip over that step and then you can see how these things go off the rails or don't always achieve expectations because you've missed that very important first step.

  But I can give you an example. So I think we all know zappos.com, they're an online shoe reseller or sales outlet. And at the time, he's now since passed away but at the time when I was working with Great Place to Work, Tony Hsieh was the CEO and he was pretty well known in the conference space. He'd be a keynote speaker [inaudible 00:06:08], was definitely at Great Place to Work at other human capital conferences. And he was very clear when he took the reins at zappos.com that he wanted to sell happiness. He knew it was a shoe sales outlet, but he didn't want his employees to feel that way. He wanted his employees to feel they were selling happiness. And he had this whole philosophy and system around making sure that the employees who worked at zappos.com felt the happiness and felt the love. They had a whole, I mean you probably saw it in the news, they had a whole national tour around this.

  They had buses and they would go to different communities and spread the love. So that was the legacy he wanted to leave on the organization. And so when you go to Zappos and you interview employees, and we did that as part of the culture vetting process for Great Place to Work, and you ask employees, "What do you do here?" More often than not, they would mention happiness. We sell happiness to customers. And it is a really kind of interesting compelling way to take what should be very transactional and make it into a really exceptional experience and feeling for the employees. Another quick example is, and I won't use the name of the company, but a large international technology firm that I was supporting and they were really struggling. They were in 60 different countries. They were having a hard time finding sort of a shared purpose.

  And I was sitting down with the CEO and I asked him a very simple question. I said, "How do you want people to feel about this organization?" And he was a little bit stunned at first. He's like, "What? Never really thought about that. But I guess if I had to answer it, I want people to know I cared about them." I go, "Well, there you go." So that became our international campaign, show you care. And we didn't tell managers what to do. There was no recipe that had to follow, but we held them accountable that when we come talk to your employees and we evaluate through an engagement survey, if your employees are not feeling that you care for them, then what's going on? And there needs to be an accountability and a consequence conversation.

  And so it took a while, it was not easy. But within a couple of years of focusing on the initiative, they were able to land at number six from the world as on the Great Place to Work survey. And of course that's one thing around branding, but we all know that when an organization enjoys a high level of trust, there's higher engagement, higher profitability, higher client satisfaction, less stress, less unhealthy conflict, all these things that we would want as leaders of an organization.

Tamara Fox: I love those two examples. And it's interesting in both examples you shared with us, the CEO was the one driving. The CEO is the one that came to you and said, "What do I do? Or how can you help me with this initiative?" What do the roles look like for different layers within the organization, the CEO versus maybe an entry-level team member or a frontline manager or supervisor? How do those roles look different when it comes to creating a high trust workplace?

David Robert: Yeah, so I mean the bare truth is that these things are much easier when you have the managing partner, the CEO, who's taking the lead on sort of spearheading this, right? I'm not saying they have to do all the work, but that they should be the visible ambassador of this type of work. But the reality is that we're not always invited to that conversation. Oftentimes we're working with, maybe it's a chief HR officer or a manager in the HR department or someone on a transformation team who has been tasked with kind of initiating the conversation about what an aspirational or future culture could look like. And it doesn't mean you can't make progress or you can't do great things if you're not a CEO or managing partner. But it becomes a tougher road. However, there are lots of things you can do if you are a lower level manager or lower level supervisor, or if you don't have any sort of management authority at all, right?

Again, we can go into some of the best practices, but you can be a great ambassador for the future you're trying to accomplish, right? Again, every organization's telling that story. And do you want to be a writer of that story or do you want to be a reader of that story? And everybody who's within that work environment has the ability to add to that narrative, add to that story and how you show up and how you make decisions and how you treat each other. And we have full control over that. We might not have control over corporate programs and policies, that's fine. But you do have control over how you are showing up and the choices you're making when you're interacting with your colleagues and your employees.

• What does an intentional, high-trust culture look like?

  Tamara Fox: Wonderful. And I love that we've given the audience a little bit of some examples here with two clients that you've actually worked with firsthand as well as talking about some of the different roles that play into building a high-trust workplace. How would you define for our audience what an intentional high-trust workplace culture is? What would we articulate to our audience that is that they could share with others either in their organization or their leaders?

  David Robert:  Yeah, sure. So I mean trust comes in a lot of different flavors, but now when you kind of peel the layers back and you get at the heart of what a high trust culture is, it's an environment, a work environment, where a vast majority, even in great environments, there are people who are not entirely happy, but a vast majority of your people are energized, motivated, have derived a sense of belonging and trust the people they work with and work for. And we know, I mean the data's very clear, decades of data. We know that in those environments, those companies win. They win time and time again. They win on financial performance, they win on turnover, they win on profitability, they win on innovation, and the list goes on and on.

  And so that's how I would define it. At Great Place to Work, they define it a little bit differently. They say a Great Place to Work, a high trust place to work is one in which I trust the people I work for. So you have a deep level of trust from management, either your direct manager or management in general. You enjoy your colleagues. So you have a friend at work, somebody you can actually kind of de-stress with and build relationship with. And the third is a deep sense of pride in what you do. So that's another way of thinking what a high trust, great workplace could look like.

• Why does trust matter?

  Tamara Fox: You alluded to it in your response as more engaged employees and better performance. But why trust matters. I know for me, in some of the data that I've seen and researched according to Gallup, Great Places to Work and others, is you do outperform your competitors as far as your profitability. You have higher engaged employees, which leads directly to customer satisfaction, leads directly to things like retention, which we know in retention it can cost two to four times the exiting employee's salary to replace that person. But why else would you say trust matters?

  David Robert:  So in our making an impact training program, we have a module on owners, renters, and squatters. So think about from a mindset perspective. So think of an owner as someone who takes full responsibility for their work, attention to quality and care, really respects and protects the brand of the organization. Goes above and beyond to help other people out, even if it's not in their carved out lane. So that owner mentality, they take ownership of the work.

  A renter is somebody who comes in and does just enough to balance their pay. So you're going to give me this much money per month. I'm going to give this much effort. They're not going above and beyond. They're leaving that responsibility up to the owners. And then the squatters are just people who are taking up physical space. They're contributing either very little or nothing and just taking up space and getting paid.

  So my question is, who do you want to work with? I want to work with owners, right? People who are challenging me and inspiring me and I have a deep level of respect for, and I want to be an owner. I want to have that mindset as well because we know that if you have a majority of your employees who think of their work through that ownership mindset, they're going to give far more back to you than what you're paying them to do. And there's nothing wrong with that. We call it gift work, but discretionary effort. And companies compete and win because their employees more often than not, are contributing to higher level of discretionary effort. And you only do that if you're engaged.

  You trust the people you work with and trust the people you work for because you know that even when things don't go exactly as planned or something happens that you're not pleased with, you're giving that organization the benefit of the doubt. And we saw during the pandemic that organizations who had made an investment on building high trust relationships before the pandemic broke out, moved through that process far more efficient and effective than those organizations who had not thought about an intentional culture or strengthening high trust relationships. People were skeptical. They were unsure about how they'd be treated as opposed to people who knew that their leaders would figure it out. And then you'd get through it in some level of wholesome semblance. And again, the data goes on and on and on in terms of the benefits both to you individually and to your organization, your teams, when there's a high level of trust.

Is Focusing Trust the Right Move for All Organizations?

Tamara Fox: And I know we're passionate about helping organizations with this. It's obviously what drives us and a lot of the work that we do with clients, but is a high trust workplace culture for every organization? Or have you encountered an organization where you're like, you know what, this is not the right path for them and why?

David Robert: Well, I mean that's a complicated question. I think every organization should have the intention of building high trust. Why wouldn't you? I mean, if that's not one of your strategic objectives then you're leaving money on the table, right, through productivity, through a lower productivity. So why would you do that? As a business owner, it makes no business sense to leave money on the table. However, there are lots of organizations and we can probably think of some on our own, who are very successful financially making record profits. And it's pretty well known that employees who work those are miserable. And so that's a very different conversation you'd have with a CEO or a senior leadership team. And we get that pushback sometimes too.

It's like, "Wait, why are we focused on culture? Things are going so well, we're making a ton of money." I said, "Well, that's one way to look at it, but are talking to your people, are you paying attention? Are you not cherry-picking feedback that's being pulled out of your organization or are you really having an authentic conversation with the people that you've invited into work with you about how they feel about you and how they feel about the organization?" Because you might find that, yeah, you're making a ton of money, good for you, but you have high turnover. People are burnt out.

I mean, we were on a webinar a few weeks back with John Ryan whose book, Make Work Healthy. I mean, he said something really struck me. He's like, "People are dying because of work." That stress just doesn't go away when you log off at the end of the day, that's you carry that stress with you into your personal life. People are having mental health issues, sleep issues, addiction issues. And so I feel we have a moral obligation to focus on building high trust relationships and building an environment where everybody has an opportunity to thrive. But I know that the reality is that there are some organizations, some leaders, who just have other priorities and it's usually a financial priority.

Tamara Fox: And in those instances, and I've seen this myself, it's those businesses that are more focused on profits than people. And it's the bottom line, the dollars instead of, like you said, your retention, not looking at the data behind how much are we losing when somebody walks out the door or what are we losing when we have disengaged employees versus engaged employees because I know that there is a lot of data supporting that your profitability as an organization is much, much higher, I think, if not double that when you have engaged employees versus disengaged employees.

David Robert: Well, I mean actually some recent data that came out of Great Place to Work shows that if you are certified as a Great Place to Work, so you've actually gone through the hard work of actually assessing your employees, your culture's been audited by some objective people and you get a ranking that those organizations outperform the stock market as much as four to one. And what we found, and we continue to pull data from a variety, it's not just Great Place to Work, McKinsey, Deloitte, Gallup, I mean all these big research institutions, they're all consistent data that organizations that report highest level of engagement, that ownership mentality, which is based on trust, they outperform, consistently outperform their peers in the stock market. And if that's important to you, not everybody defines winning as through a financial lens. The other organizations might find winning through engagement or through the impact you're having on the community. And so there's lots of ways to define winning, but if financial performance was something that was interesting to you, the data is crystal clear, that high trust, you win.

Tamara Fox: Love it. So then how are you seeing clients today? And we can talk about this too, how we've seen clients, but how are organizations actively pursuing these initiatives? What does that look like?

David Robert: So we have a whole transformation roadmap that we actually use when we're supporting clients. And so ideally you'd like to move from the start of that to the finish, but what often happens more often than not is that we're pulled in sort of midstream. They're already off and running and trying to execute against activities and what they think the priorities are. And so I see a lot of that activity where, and it's usually, I think it's a huge mistake, but it's usually tucked under the HR function, right? Leaders relegate or delegate this to HR. You guys take care of it. I think it's a mistake because you want it to be seen as a business imperative, as a strategic objective, not something that HR working on in the shadows. It doesn't mean HR can't play an important role. I think a really important role that HR can play on making sure the work gets done, but it really should not be seen as an HR function.

But more often than not, we do see it tucked under HR and we're human. I think most of us derive a sense of pride and accomplishment by what we do with our hands. We're very sort of action focused. And so oftentimes when I'm brought in to support a client, there's this long laundry list of programs and policies that they're trying to implement around... It could be around flexible work schedules or time off, or it could be parental leave or it could be educational stuff. And they're trying to jam all that into place without really thinking about are those things actually helping to build the story you want to tell? And are they reinforcing that feeling that you want people to have?

And so when I can, I try to get my clients to back up a bit and go back to that question so that I can be a better advisor for them and say, "You know what, those two programs that you're going to spend a hundred grand on, those are not the ones you should be focusing on because they're not going to reinforce that feeling that we talked about that you want people to have when they think about the organization." I would shift my focus over to these other programs and it's hard for us to be those thought partners and practitioners if we don't have that first question answered.

Tamara Fox:  And one thing I feel that we're seeing a lot of is organizations coming to us and saying, "Hey, we need help with managing generational differences or we need support with DE&I, or we want to do training in EQ versus IQ." We see a lot of these to me, which almost feels like ad hoc kind of very narrow focus that all truly boil down to trust. Managing generational differences is easy if you have trust with your generations and your workforce. Creating a culture of inclusion boils down to trust. Emotional intelligence, huge component of that is your relationships and how you show up behaviorally. Do you feel that maybe organizations are tackling the trust workplace culture from a more tactical kind of narrow perspective versus taking that big step back and thinking about our larger strategic initiative as an organization and what this holistically looks like?

David Robert: So I will say I'm encouraged that more, I wouldn't say a majority, but more clients are taking that step back and looking at more of an enterprise approach, making sure all those various interventions are working together and that they make sense. So I'm seeing a bit more of that, which is encouraging to me because really what you should be doing. But I still think a vast majority our default is to want to put the fire out. And because either it's a pain point that you're experiencing or you anticipate a pain point popping up and you want to be proactive about making sure you mitigate that.

And it's fine to do that. I mean, you don't want those fires to burn out of control, right? It's fine to do that, but I think you have to be doing both at the same time, addressing either opportunities or pain points, but also having your eye on that more enterprise strategic lens about what are we trying to accomplish here and where should my attention be at any given time on this transformation? So you as the one who's kind of shepherding the work has some clarity in terms of what you need to prioritize as well.

And volume is not the answer here. And you were the client recently Tamara, and they had, no word of a lie, a list of a hundred things they wanted to tackle and we're like "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's do one thing. Let's do one thing, get some momentum, get a quick win under your belt," and momentum is really important in the early stage of a culture shift. Get some quick wins. So these are lower risk, higher impact activities that you might want to focus on and then start to tackle the more-

Tamara Fox: We probably lost you about a minute ago, so I don't know if you could backtrack for us and start over with one.

David Robert: Yeah, I was thinking a point that, I mean again, when I'm talking with clients about culture, you can almost see a glazed look over their face because it's a very intimidating topic. But the process of shifting one's culture is actually pretty simple. Again, what's the feeling we want people to have about us? What behaviors and programs and policies do we have to implement that are going to reinforce that feeling and then what are the consequences for not aligning around that? And I think the most complicated piece of it is the consequence piece. And I can tell you that in all great organizations that I've had a privilege of working with, they were very clear about consequence management. This is our leadership philosophy, this is the feeling you want employees to have. If your people in your department are not feeling that way, it's a conversation.

Tamara Fox: And one thing I've noticed from my years of consulting with a variety of businesses, everywhere from startup to enterprise is people have good intentions. They want this. They have the right intention there, typically. What I've found though in most organizations is they have poor execution or not the best execution when it comes to these initiatives because everything else becomes more important. The day-to-day takes over the ability to say, "Wait, we made a promise and a commitment that this quarter we are going to move forward this priority to move progress towards our larger goal."

I mean to me when I work with clients when it comes to this topic, it's what you said before, taking that large roadmap with a lot of phases and continuing to move that needle closer and closer to that north star or that ideal state in small wins and small ways, but we continue to make progress. I feel a lot of clients think of when you mentioned that glazed over kind of freeze, pause, they get really scared because it is a lot of work, but it's small chunked at work throughout the year to get them there in different ways, whether that's trainings, whether that's engagement surveys. There's different actual actionable items that come of that. But why do you think that organizations that have the right intention lack the ability to execute when it comes to this work?

• Why do some organizations have the right intentions but lack the ability to execute this type of work?

  David Robert: Great question. So I would say a couple things. The first is I think that clients sometimes go into this work with unrealistic expectations of when they should see results. And it doesn't mean you can't get some quick wins and some things get implemented and people are happy about it, but bigger results around financial outcome, that's an example, or turnover. It took a long time to get to a current state where you might not be optimizing revenue or a turnover, voluntary turnover. So it takes time. And I saw that I think people get frustrated and kind of tired, and I'm not seeing results fast enough. So that's the first thing.

  I think second thing is just time. Time's our currency and people, again, in organizations where people feel overwhelmed with work, they have very little time to commit to new priorities, see this as yet one more thing that you're going to add to my plate. And I'm very candid and honest, say, "Yeah, it is going to take more time in the short term, but the intention is to make your work easier so you actually can free up more time but do other really important things and things you might enjoy doing." So that initial time consumption piece is very intimidating.

  I think another one, and this is my terminology, it's the behavioral economy aspect of this. Every organization has both formal and informal rewards. It rewards people's behavior, people's performance, people's outcomes, and are we placing the right reward on the right behavior? And what we often find is that we're actually rewarding behaviors and output that actually is counteracting what we're trying to accomplish around that feeling. And the perfect example is you have a rainmaker who everyone knows is problematic, who maybe behaves in a way that's not ideal. And yet we just ignore that person because they're making a lot of money for us.

  Well everybody else is experiencing the aftermath of that person's behavior. And that gets socialized broadly and everyone knows of the problem. And when they don't see consequence for that behavior, then that becomes part of the cultural thread and part of the story you're telling that we tolerate bad behavior because we value money over people's wellness and psychological safety at work. And we have lots of examples of those types of situations with clients we've worked with.

  And the last piece I would say is, and this is probably the more complicated one, especially if you are a lower level supervisor manager who doesn't have a lot of control over policies and programs, but you have to have an infrastructure, when I say infrastructure, you have to have programs and policies that actually incentivize the behavior and support the behavior you're trying to see. And oftentimes those things are missing. And so that's why I think HR becomes a really important player because they oftentimes do have influence and control over those programs and policies. And so that's why I think it's appropriate for HR to really lean in and take some leadership on culture work because you need that infrastructure in place. And I think because we're often talking to and working with people who don't have that level of authority, then they throw their hands in the air and say, "There's not much I can do here." So I think we've hit an impasse around the culture work because I'm not the one who can move this beyond this hurdle.

• How do you measure the results of workplace culture work?

  Tamara Fox: And I know you mentioned this before about the results. They're very fixated on the results or being able to measure those results. And often when we meet with clients and talk about this topic, they ask us those questions. How do we know this initiative's working or how would we measure our results? So for our audience, if they were to go through a larger scale strategic cultural initiative, how would they know it's working and how would they potentially measure those results?

  David Robert: Great question. So again, on that roadmap, the first phase or bucket of work is that I call it the discovery phase, which is what's that feeling, what's the story? Get really clear about that. And then part of that bucket of work is to pick your assessment tool. What tool do you want to use to gauge the sentiment and the level of engagement, the level of trust, level of inclusion across your organization? And again, for me, the tool's less important than your intention, but the tool really does have to be, it does have to measure the right thing. So I'd be curious to understand, to what degree do people trust management. Do they see us as credible, trusted advisors and leaders? Are they engaged in the work? They feel motivated by the work they're doing, and do they feel psychologically safe? And that can be measured through the lens of inclusion or belonging, but there has to be a psychological safety.

  And I'd probably check in about people's mental health too. So you understand the degree to which you're kind of nearing burnout in pockets within your organization. So you don't have to have a 150 statement assessment. A handful of questions that really get at the heart of what you're trying to do and then survey your employees frequently. Often it's very common to do a once a year engagement survey, that's fine. But are there a handful of questions you could actually pop onto your internet site or put into a newsletter and have people respond so that in more real time where things are going well and where work still needs to be done rather than waiting a 12-month period when things could be going off the rails for a period of time. So that's the first thing.

  The second thing is, again, it goes back to consequence. Don't just look at the data from an enterprise perspective. Hold your people managers accountable. So I would cut data at the manager level and create a little scorecard for my managers and say, "Well, so here's how your people feel about you and the work environment and here's how you compare to your peers." Because what we want to see is high trust and consistency. So it's not like zigzag, low trust, high trust. We want to see high trust no matter what role you're in, no matter what location you sit in, no matter who you report to. And if there are variations, then it's an opening for a conversation around why are your results different. And so without those conversations then A, I'm not trying to be negative, but you do let people off the hook. And by the very nature of doing that, you are denying pockets of your organization from fully thriving.

Tamara Fox: Absolutely. And one thing that I think often comes up with clients that we talk about is while you can measure data internally, you're speaking to the engagement surveys and others, there's also ways externally to gauge and measure what's going on whether that's... Like Glassdoor reviews I think is one great example because that is where you get the true honesty from former and current employees as to why they left. And you can see what is actually the trends in your data there. I think with AI coming up too, employers need to be being more mindful of this.

I know it changes generation and generation, but a lot of people these days are utilizing Glassdoor, Fishbowl. I'm sure with the creation of AI, there's going to be dozens more sites out there that are going to give you data on what it's like to work for an organization. So it's not only working with those internal employees too, but it's talking about the brand, talking about the organization, which trickles out externally. There's ways to measure that internally, but what people say externally matters just as much. So could you speak to how organizations can focus there or how they can make change and impact there as well?

David Robert:  Sure. I want to go back and just make one art of thought though because you and I have had this conversation before, Tamara, the measurement piece is really, really important. But you can't do it internally. You really do have to outsource that mechanism to an objective third party because again, having worked for survey organizations for a long, long time, I know that people are still highly skeptical and intimidated around confidentiality, that their response is not going to be held against them or that they are candid, which is what we want from them. Honesty and candidness is a gift back to the leaders of the organization. There's still a underlying fear that big brothers watching responses and is going to retaliate, right?

So when you have a third party administer that assessment, it doesn't remove it entirely. But you do I think significantly mitigate that level of skepticism and nervousness. So if you want honest feedback, you really have to have an objective organization do that for you because we've had conversations with clients who say, "Yeah, we're going to do it internally." It's like that's your prerogative. Do that if you want to, but here's the consequences of doing that. If you're willing to fix those consequences, then that's fine, but I would prefer to get honest responses from people and therefore I'd have somebody objectively collecting that data.

Tamara Fox: And two, before you answer my other question, what I've seen with clients, when they do do it internally, they end up coming back and saying, "Actually, can you help us with this? And can we re-administer it?" And by that point you've already diminished trust with the employees because they're like, "You just did this, why are we redoing this survey two months later with an external vendor?" Instead of just doing it right the first time. I think what I've noticed with the clients that I've worked with around this topic is they'll say, "Hey, we don't want to spend this money right now." And then they'll do it internally and then nobody will respond because people, to your point, they are concerned that there is some way that it can be tracked back to who internally, somebody internally will be able to figure out who responded how.

So then they'll come back to us and say, "Okay, we didn't get the response rate we wanted or people were hesitant to respond because we are engaging internally." And then they ask us. And then it's more difficult to backtrack with the organization and start all over instead of just starting with an external vendor from square one, showing them, we want you to be as transparent and provide us the true feedback, showing them upfront because to me, I tell organization, it shows an employee, you trust them when you're saying we're handing this over to an external vendor to do this the right way instead of holding it internally. And again, showing employees we potentially don't trust anyone, so we want to manage this internally. Any reaction or thoughts on that?

David Robert:  I mean it's spot on, spot on. I've worked with clients who have handled this internally and the results come back glowing. And so they walk away with a perception that everything's going great. They take their eye off of this important work because things are fine when they've missed an opportunity for people to be super honest with them. It's like, yeah, it's not going well for me. I'm not feeling the love, I'm not feeling a lot of respect or a lot of trust right now and here's why. And sometimes it's valid points and sometimes it's not valid, but it is still an opportunity to have a conversation, to clarify, to make sure that you're all aligned around what you're trying to accomplish.

And to me, it's, again, you're leaving money on the table because you just missed an opportunity to A, you did spend money on it because time is money and so how many resource hours did you spend actually handling this? And then you didn't get to a level of truth. And so it was kind of work for naught, unless your company's sort of the exception and people feel super confident and super comfortable sharing candid feedback through an online mechanism. Maybe you got lucky. But I think a vast majority of organizations have people who are still highly skeptical. And so again, for me it's a no-brainer. Outsource it.

When Past Employees Can Share Their Experiences

Tamara Fox: And back to my question or comment around the Glassdoor or people talking about brand, the use of AI and more upcoming technology and the ability to better understand what's happening within organizations, even if you're not working there, what could you share with our audience around people talking about the brand and actually seeing change with the organizations you've worked with about how people talk about the brand?

David Robert: So again, the Glassdoor one's interesting, right, because it's kind of, for a restaurant review, you don't have to be... It actually takes a bigger effort for someone to give you a positive result or a positive review than it is for a negative review. Because if you have bad experience, you are so motivated to make sure everybody knows what happened and you are going to run off to the Google review or to Glassdoor and let them have it, right. And that takes very little motivation. All you have to do is have a bad feeling and off you go. And it's so accessible right now. It takes two seconds to go and give a review online so you don't have to drive your car across town. Just log in and them have it.

It takes far more of an effort and an experience for someone to go out and leave you a positive review. And so again, what I would say is are you upskilling your people managers so that they are managing in a high trust way so that people, when they are asked about, "Oh, what's it like to work there," the default is to share positive perspective. I love where I work. We had so much fun. I love my manager. We have unbelievable benefits here. I can't imagine getting this experience from anywhere else. So I'm going to emotionally anchor myself here.

That only happens if there is long-term consistent high trust behavior within the organization and we can't just say... It's one thing to say, "Here's our leadership philosophy or here's the feeling want people to have," and then go back to your office and cross your fingers and hope that people do the right thing. You have to train them to do the right thing. And then part of that is training them so they have the insight to know how to manage another person, how to build a relationship in a high trust way, giving feedback, offering direction, being in that sort of coach/mentor. That requires training.

Some of us maybe naturally, but most of us aren't right? But you also have the other side of that coin is the consequence. I went back to cutting data at the manager level. I would want to know if I were running a company, how are my people managers showing up and what impact is that having on people? Because if they're showing up in a high trust way, your people are going to dazzle your clients and they're going to talk in a very positive way when they're out in the community talking to the people about their workplace.

Tamara Fox: And they'll naturally want to do it. That's what I've found with organizations I've worked with where there is this high trust workplace. Employees are asking to attend networking events, they're asking to go do more. It's that willingness and desire and drive is there naturally from the employee instead of a leadership directive. You create this desire internally with an employee when they have trust and they feel that trust within their workplace. And I know we talk about this all the time internally and with clients, but it starts with that leadership.

A high-trust culture starts with leadership

So that's when you spoke to earlier, the CEO or the managing partner, whoever the owner is of the organization, really needs to be bought in and modeling the way with behaviors and outcomes of what they want the organization to look like when it comes to this so that it continues to go into all the layers of the organization because when all of the employees don't see that high level leader modeling that or holding to what they said when it comes to creating a high trust workplace, they lose their trust. They lose their opportunity there to build that trust from the start.

I've seen too, unfortunately, we've talked about this with HR where they get put in charge of driving these initiatives. So HR is driving it, driving it, driving it. The CEO has no desire at all, but HR say, drafting these messages, having the CEO email them out and then the CEO will get into a meeting and scream at everybody or do something very inappropriate. And people are like, why did the CEO just send us this email talking about how our certain behaviors, we're going to all start modeling in order to create a high trust workplace and then turn around and do the opposite.

David Robert:  Absolutely. And I think that one of the other things that creates a level of complexity, even if it's just a perception of complexity is that... I lost my train of thought for a minute, but it is 99% of this revolves around communication. So it's not just formal, like formal communication sent to your people, but again how you are communicating in the micro moments too, right? So your corporate communication channel is really important so that you're kind of driving a shared understanding what we're trying to accomplish around, whether it's through leadership philosophy or management expectations or a culture expectation. But most people are deriving their information and that feeling they have about the organization in those micro moments, the little side chat you have with your employee, the feedback conversations you have with your manager, which is why upskilling people managers is so critically important.

And again, it's not meant to be prescriptive. It's not like here's the recipe that every organization gives their leaders. Every organization will get at this in a unique way as they should because every organization's different. They have different history, different DNA. So that's oftentimes a question we get asked, "Just tell me what to do. Give me a playbook and I'll socialize and we can solve this problem." It's like, no, no, no, no. It has to be organically developed. And so I've never seen two organizations go at it the same way. The process is consistent, but the nuances of the activities and the programs really need to reflect the uniqueness of your organization. And so there is no magic recipe here.

This is why the time consumption is an issue because it does take time to sit down and really think about again, who do we want to be and what's the leadership profile and philosophy that needs to exist here? And then how do we actually get our leaders upskilled and trained so they understand, A, those concepts, but also how to translate those concepts into behaviors. And that's where I think organizations get stuck is that they're looking for some off the shelf leadership program or development program and they're not really thinking about how it needs to be customized so that it is telling and reinforcing that story that's unique to your organization. Really important part.

One-off trainings are not enough to transform an entire culture

Tamara Fox: And I love that you shared that with the audience because it happens more often than not of a client's just like, "Hey, can we have this one training and it'll fix our culture?" It's no. I think that's the thing that we try to advocate for when we're working with our clients. This is a large journey of understanding, yes, as you shared, the phases that we go through will be the same, but each phase of that will look different. And I know we often get resistance from clients of, "Well, that's too long or that's too much." But what else do you think organizations look for? Or what have you seen organizations look for when wanting to work with consultants to create a high trust culture? Besides just that, "Hey, can I have something off the shelf," have you seen other themes or trends when organizations come to you?

David Robert: So I think the common ask is some kind of a diagnostic. That's probably the more frequent sort of intervention or activity we're involved in is that the client knows that there's either an opportunity that can be seized or there's a pain point that keeps popping up. It may pop up in a different area of the organization or may pop up with different people involved, but they know that there's something going on here and they'll have us come in and say, "Can you do some root cause analysis to make sure that before I invest in coaching or training or some other intervention that I'm actually addressing the right thing?" So we do a lot of that work, which is really important to do. And it's a smart move, right, because oftentimes it doesn't always happen, but oftentimes we find out that what we thought the original problem was as it was, wasn't the problem at all.

It was just a manifestation or symptom of a deeper issue that we wouldn't have discovered if we were just going to apply that sort of top level intervention. So that's probably the most common one. I think that I'm actually seeing more and more clients being much more strategic with their people management as well. So it's not just like, "Hey, let's get these four skills in here." It's much more like how do we actually proactively, before we launch a program, think about what we want to see from those managers. So what's the behavior change we want to see? And then what components do we have to add to that program to increase the likelihood of skill acquisition?

Because oftentimes we go into a training, there's objectives, learning outcomes, and then we never check back in and say, "Are you still using those skills? Have you adopted these skills? How has your job changed? Do you see yourself as a more effective manager?" But I'm seeing a lot more clients asking us to be a thought partner in terms of should we add coaching because coaching is a safe place for someone to work through insecurities about or testing a new skill rather than doing it on their team and being embarrassed. So those types of things are happening more frequently too. And it's very encouraging because listen, we know that training can be a very effective solution, but you do want to put things in place to increase the likelihood of ROI and skill acquisition. And I'm seeing more of that as well.

Tamara Fox: Wonderful. I have two final questions I'd like us to talk through before we wrap up, just as takeaways for our audience to have. And that first is, what can organizations do to drive change internally or better collaborate internally to bring visibility to the changes happening within the workplace? So that's the first one. And the second is, I know most of our audience is HR professionals or managers or leaders within an organization, but maybe not that CEO or managing partner. So what advice would you give to our audience as they walk away today on what they should advocate for or share with their CEO or leaders within their organization to drive change?

David Robert: So two very good questions. So the first one, one of the best practices that I've sort of observed when I'm working with organizations who really have been doing this for a long time, really investing in trust and really have a level of sophistication around understanding what that feeling they want people to have. And one of the best practices that I've seen is you have to have a mechanism to share ideas. So it's not just about once a year you have a town hall or you have a survey or a suggestion box. It has to be an experiential interaction with other people. So I would recommend that maybe on a quarterly basis talk about what's going well because every organization, even if the organization's not a great or high trust workplace, there are really good things going on. And oftentimes we don't know what those things are because we're not speaking to each other.

And so I would facilitate best practice session, maybe three or four times a year and have employees... And some of that data can be collected on your culture survey, if you have a freeform response field. What do you like about the organization? That's often a question we ask on those kind of assessments and then people are very happy to share what's going well. And it's an opportunity to take some of those ideas and socialize them more broadly across the organization so that everyone has an opportunity to experience that. That's the first thing. And again, it doesn't have to be overly complicated or expensive. It could be a virtual huddle or if you have people in the office get them together and say, "What's going well?"

Second, you asked for some advice. So if I were a mid-level manager, a low-level manager who's curious about this, right, I would start the conversation. Raise your hand. And we talked about owners versus renters versus squatters. Be an owner and go to the person who leads your HR function. Go to the person, your COO, or if you have a connection, if you're a small organization and you have some pathway to actually speak to the CEO, start the conversation. Have you thought about this? I'm curious about it. Or what's the plan? I'm unclear about what the plan is in terms of nurturing our culture and would love to play a role on that.

I've seen organizations where they've shifted culture from a grassroots perspective. Frontline employees got together and shared stories and shared ideas and got energized about what the future could look like. And again, it's not an antagonistic thing. They weren't going and complaining. They were really trying to instill a sense of pride and inspiration in terms of what the future could look like. Again, we all have control over that. And so those are a couple things that I would do. And again, if your organization's not doing a survey, build one, assess your team, start there. How does your team feel? Right? Maybe it's not even an assessment. Maybe it's a conversation. "How are things going with you? Are you feeling good about the work? Are you stuck? How is your mental health?"

So start those conversations. You got to start somewhere. Somebody has to go first. So those are things that I would do if I were thinking that my role wasn't big enough or I didn't have the authority to make enterprise wide change, I would start at my team level. And again, I mentioned to you at the very beginning of the hour, we all have control over how we show up, how we actually make decisions, how we share feedback, how we delegate and direct people's work. We have full control over that. And are you doing that in a high trust way?

And I say, when I teach this course, this broader course on trust, I always leave my participants with a question. At the end of your work week, I would ask myself, when I think back to all the conversations I had at work, all the decisions I made, all the emails I sent, right, all the work I delegated, was I building trust more often than I was diminishing trust? And if you're honest, when you're answering that question, you will have opportunities for improvement, right, opportunities for you to catch yourself before you say something, do something that's going to diminish trust. And if we're all... Think about it. If I'm doing that individually, think about the impact that would have on the people that work alongside of me. But now think about if everyone in the organization's having that conversation with themselves at the end of the week, think what's possible.

Closing Thoughts

Tamara Fox:  Yeah, I love it. Well, thank you. I know you and I talk about this topic for hours every week, and we could probably continue to talk for a few more hours, but I want to make sure we're mindful of our audience's time. I do want to thank our audience for joining us today, and I'd love for our audience to take away and think about or collaborate internally with what story is your organization or firm telling. And hopefully you walked away with some great tips of advice and some things to think about as well. But don't hesitate to reach out to David or myself. My email is Tamara@LoebLeadership and David's is David@LoebLeadership. You can also find direct links to our emails on our website, loebleadership.com if you'd like to contact us. We're always happy to spend time talking with organizations more and helping guide organizations more on this topic. We could talk about it for hours. So thank you.

David Robert:  Last thought, Tamara. So we love to have clients sort of drive the content that we're sharing. So if anybody has a topic that they're super curious about or would like us to do some research on and share some best practices, reach out to us and share those thoughts. And we're more than happy to make sure that we hit those topics in future webinars.

Tamara Fox:  Yeah, absolutely. We want to provide relevant information. We bring up these webinars based off of what is new best practices or again, what our clients are asking for. So thank you all again, so much for your time. David, thank you again for your time. Lindsay, thank you so much for all of your help and we hope everybody has a wonderful rest of their day.