blog

A Culture of Trust

by Johanna

At our most recent winter strategy offsite, we spent a lot of time talking about our culture and how we relate to each other. One theme was pervasive: trust is fundamental to the smooth functioning of our company. Trust remains critical amongst coworkers, but is becoming tougher to achieve for a few reasons, including the following:

• Everyone's Working From Home: Instituting "Flextime," or giving the option of working outside of the office, gives people the freedom to pick the place and time that will be happiest and most productive, but also requires collective trust that we're all working our hardest.
• We Prefer Anything But In Person: Even when everyone is in the office, e-mail instead of face-to-face communication is often the way coworkers relate to each other. While it may be efficient, e-mail doesn't communicate tone and body language. Electronic message recipients end up doing a fair amount of interpretation of short, quickly-written e-mails.

One way that we foster trust is through our company offsites. We spend three days, two times per year, reaffirming our mission and learning more about each other as individuals. Discussing the future of our firm, having open dialogues about our culture and how to improve it, and even cooking meals together helps instill that critical trust that we are all working toward our collective success.

Cutting edge companies are using the idea of leading with trust, as opposed to fostering an environment in which employees need to earn it or prove they are worthy of it. For example, Apple uses the concept "Assume Positive Intent" as one of its core values. The idea of leading with trust is also fairly well argued in the short essay "Trust CAN Possibly Be Good."

How can we as leaders and as individuals promote a workplace that leads with trust?