How is the trust level of your organisation?
“In our hospital, trust is everything and without trust everything is nothing” – CEO Health Group Bern, Switzerland
We had set aside two days to reflect on the challenge of how to develop more ‘health’ in the day-to-day delivery of healthcare. Why is it that within this world of healthcare, so many professionals, executives and also the structures themselves are so unhealthy and overburdened? Of course, there are countless reasons why working and living in healthcare is so complicated and often exhausting. And all these reasons are undoubtedly important. After two days of design thinking, we presented our initial ideas to two CEOs of several larger healthcare institutions, we named one of the solution ideas the ‘High Trust Organisation’.
In his book ‘Trust Works’, Paul Zak describes how years of research clearly shows that a ‘High Trust Organisation’ is more meaningful, productive and humane than a ‘Low Trust Organisation’. Here’s some of the findings:
The ‘High Trust Organisation’ delivers (compared to a ‘Low Trust Organisation’):
74% less stress
106% more energy in the workplace
50% higher productivity
76% more engagement
29% more satisfaction in private life
40% less burn-out
Therefore, ‘High Trust Organisations’ turns out to be more than worth it! A director recently spoke to me on this topic and said, “But surely you can also use pressure and fear to encourage people to perform higher?” True. But this form of leadership works mainly in the short term and loses its effect immediately when the pressure and fear subside. So, apart from the many harmful effects that fear produces, such as miscommunication, distrust, burnout, inner resignation and a culture of manipulation, it still turns out to produce less productivity than a ‘high trust organisation’.
Fact is, despite the short-term effect of anxiety, the ‘high trust organisation’ still yields 50% more productivity and 40% less burnout.
These two components alone mean a huge improvement in both the quality of your service, and also the financial result of your organisation.
Back to our presence in Basel. One of the two CEOs responded immediately to the ‘High Trust Organisation’ theme and gave us his credo for his entire healthcare organisation: “for us trust is everything and without trust everything is nothing”. He translated his credo to all parts of his organisation:
- Trust between doctors and nurses
- Trust between managers and professionals
- Trust between patients and healthcare staff
- Inter-departmental trust
- Trust between the central service and the various healthcare facilities of this healthcare group.
Interestingly, they score high not only on patient satisfaction surveys but also on employee satisfaction surveys. For them, captivating and retaining the right employees is not easy but very successful. The question then becomes: how do you create a culture of trust? As the proverb says: “Trust comes on foot, but disappears on horseback”.
How do you create something as elusive and not so easily measurable as trust. Paul Zak has been researching exactly this, making trust measurable for the last 20 years. And this shows that trust is not a mystery, but a developable and trainable virtue/attitude. In the coming ‘leadership inspiration nuggets’, we would like to explore with you the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of the phenomenon of trust. And then always looking especially for how you can apply this directly and practically within your company or organisation.
Here is the five core elements of building ‘high trust organisation’ advance. We will deal with each of these in the following ‘leadership inspiration nuggets’. One ‘nugget’/’gold nugget’ each, for immediate use in your daily practice.
Fancy getting started?
Order the book ‘Appreciation’ by Paul Ch. Donders. This contains a complete tool box to start with the first two elements of the High Trust Organisation: ‘Building bridges of trust’ and ‘A culture of appreciation’.
If you want to build a High Trust Organization, please feel free to contact us.
I wish you and your team a ‘High Trust Organisation’, because that is so much more fun, inspirational and productive, making it more than worth it.
Blog written by Paul Ch. Donders
“If everyone hires people ‘smaller’ than us, we will become a company of dwarfs. But if everyone hires people who are ‘bigger’ than us, we will become a company of giants!” – David Ogily