Hiring For Trust

Bloomberg Businessweek recently featured an article in its ‘Human Business’ section entitled Because Employees Can't Be Trusted, which pointed to often hidden costs of hundreds of millions of dollars inherent in low trust company cultures

Because employees can’t be trusted, we have put in place a massive system of policies and controls to make sure no one steps out of line. It costs hundreds of millions of shareholder and customer dollars to manage this system, but it must be worth it because we’re so certain our employees are untrustworthy - notwithstanding the fact that we hired every one of them ourselves.

We write mistrust into our management guidelines. We institutionalise it in our policy handbooks. We reinforce it with every insulting memo and “to the staff” broadcast e-mail. We ding employees when they forget their ID badges and penalize them for leaving work a half-hour early to pay a traffic ticket. We willingly take and make the most of the juice and spark our teammates bring us because they can’t help connecting to their work at a level far above what the paycheck requires, but we fall back down to the level of the transaction as soon as it’s convenient to do so.

When it matters, we say: “It’s business.” When we need the extra effort, the last mile, the work-all-weekend push, or the thankless, endless trip to God-knows-where, then it’s all about the team. We don’t deserve the trust we get in those moments, but humans are trusting.

If we were to treat our customers the way we treat employees, they’d run for the hills. Somehow, because customers give us their cash, we believe their every wish is our command. Since employees give us only their brains, guts, emotional connection, time, and goodwill, the deal is slightly different. We treat our employees as though they’re only waiting for the chance to take us down.

If we value talent, we’ll start dismantling the lumbering Godzilla of controls and policies that hampers creativity in virtually every organisation, and we’ll start trusting ourselves to hire people we trust. Then our jobs will get easier and the energy at work will improve dramatically. What are we waiting for?

The solution proposed - 'to start hiring people we trust' - is a sensible one, but our experience from specialising in this area over the past 7 years is that while many may aspire to trust based recruitment policies, they don't start with a strong definition of what trust is or what its component parts are. This 'truth' reflects Thomas Davenport's observation that The more an organisation knows about a term or concept relevant to its business, the less likely it is to agree on a common term or meaning for it, and leads to the conclusion that without this common understanding it becomes very difficult to consistently hire, assess, develop and reward people based on trust.