Organisational Trust: Could this be the Key in Reducing Workplace Stress?

Hello, hello! My name is Sara Trafaria, and I’m a Client Success Manager at The People Experience Hub (PxHub). I’ve been at The PxHub for close to 2 years now, and something that I’ve noticed is...

Organisational trust is an area I find incredibly interesting, mainly because of how crucial a part it can play in employee wellbeing. For my master's degree, I chose this as my dissertation topic. While it was amazing to read the existing research, my dissertation opened my eyes to the lack of research on organisational trust acting as a stressor and how it can contribute to workplace stress.

What is Trust? And what is Trust as a stressor?

So, trust as a stressor, what is it? Well, there are various sources of organisational stress, including workload and demands, work insecurity, role conflict, lack of autonomy, and more. Trust is one of these sources of organisational stress and can heavily impact an individual's mental wellbeing.

In fact, it can play a role in how much the other organisational stressors mentioned above affect individuals. Why is that? Because where there are high levels of trust, the impact of other organisational stressors can be dampened. If there are mutual trust relationships, people will feel more supported and are more likely to ask for help and support when needed. For instance, if individuals feel their workload is too much, or if they feel they would like more autonomy at work, if they trust their supervisors, their managers, their leaders – they are much more likely to speak up and ask for support around these potential issues because the trust that has been built shows them they are heard, supported, and people care about them. Whereas, if the work environment has low levels of trust, people won’t feel as though they can rely on their organisation to help them through these stress points.

In recent years, it seems this has started to come to light. However, what I found during the time working on my dissertation is that research tends to focus more on how trust can affect engagement, which is important, but it does not focus enough on how trust within organisations makes people perceive and feel about their working environment and working stress levels. The thing is, when you think about it, it’s difficult to conduct research on the negative aspects of trust at work because people are not likely to take part in a study if they do not trust.

Why trust matters?

During my time at The People Experience Hub, it has been so amazing to see organisational trust come to life, as opposed to just reading about it at university. Something that was highlighted in my dissertation and that I can say I’ve been able to experience at The PxHub is that organisational trust can help to improve as well as prevent high stress levels within organisations. It can essentially act as a shield from the negative impacts of stress.

A person’s capability of handling stressful life events, as well as stressful work events, can be improved when there are high levels of trust at work, and this is something that, in turn, enables them to be more satisfied in their jobs. The best way to put this into context a bit more is to put ourselves in the shoes of a person who does not trust their colleagues or who does not trust their leaders. Do we think this person will feel comfortable at work? Do we think this person will feel like they can make mistakes at work? Do we think this person feels like they can learn and grow from those mistakes? Do we think this person feels encouraged to speak up if they need any kind of working arrangements for whatever reason it may be?

The reality is, we all make mistakes. We’re human, it happens! However, it’s learning from those mistakes that helps us to grow, and if we feel comfortable going to our leaders and explaining what has happened and the next steps, the situation is so much better than feeling constricted and thinking the world is ending because a mistake was made. Equally, feeling comfortable that we can go to our leaders and ask for working arrangements for any reason, whether it’s an appointment during the workday we can’t miss, or a parent who needs to start work a little later that day because they need to drop off their child at school, or because we need a day off since we’re feeling under the weather that day. These are all things that are so important to our mental wellbeing, and if we don’t have trusting relationships at work to discuss these things, it can negatively impact it.

Imagine this...

Imagine you don’t trust the people you work with, and you feel like you can’t make any mistakes at work, you can’t discuss any work arrangements or discuss any issues that may be weighing on you mentally – that is an incredible amount of pressure for someone to have, to feel like they have to be perfect, because their work environment lacks trust and they don’t feel encouraged to find solutions or don’t feel like asking for help will bring them any solutions.

From a customer success point of view, when high trust relationships are there, it is easier to find a resolution when things go wrong. This doesn’t mean we feel like it’s fine for things to go wrong. Rather, when there is a trusting relationship, it makes it easier to be transparent about what has happened and how it can and will be resolved. It is easier to communicate with our clients when there is trust too. It is easier to be ourselves and to share our personal opinions on what we are discussing and during the conversations we have.

How to Build Trust:

• Transparency: being transparent and honest about what is going on, about both the positives and the negatives.
• Listening to people: listening to what they are feeling, what can help them, or listening to any feedback they may have on how to improve different work environment areas.
• Communicate: ensuring there is regular communication.
• Having an inclusive culture in the organisation.
• Show appreciation regularly.
• Encourage people to speak up, to ask questions, to ask for help, to give feedback, to be themselves.

Building and maintaining trust can have its challenges. A lack of transparency and communication leads to suspicion, which will negatively impact trust. Consistency is key in both building trust and ensuring that it is maintained in the long term. If people become used to certain standards of information being effectively communicated, of important discussions taking place, of praise being given where it’s due, of being encouraged to speak up, and suddenly these now set standards cease to exist - trust will be broken. When trust is broken, it is so much more difficult to rebuild it than it is to build trust from scratch. Hence, why it is so important to focus on how to retain trust, otherwise all the time and hard work put into forming it can be at risk.

How can we help your organisation?

Our platform gives you a space to ask questions surrounding trust and measure the general level of trust in the business. For example, one of our clients has spoken with us about how they would like to do a general trust survey to understand how trust is perceived around the business, and how people feel about trust at work. I think this is so interesting and exciting, to see more and more people interested in looking at how trust is being perceived and seen in their business and wanting to improve it wherever possible.

Get in touch with a member of the team here!

Fancy learning more about trust? We held a webinar recently with an expert panel on 'Building Trust: How Psychological Safety Transforms Work Environments'