Can I Trust You?
One topic that often surfaces during employee surveys, teambuilding activities, and change efforts is trust. Can employees trust management to have their best interests at heart? Can managers trust employees to perform their work and follow rules? Trust is the foundation on which organizational development efforts succeed or fail. To that extent, there are some key behaviors that you can use to develop or re-build trust among your employees:
- Support and praise one another. Encourage others when they’re down.
- Keep sensitive information confidential.
- Stand up for each other inside and outside the team.
- Avoid gossip or unfair criticism. Take your concerns directly to the person involved rather than talking about them to others.
- Appreciate and benefit from each others’ differences. Assign tasks based on skills, abilities, and preferences whenever possible.
Some of these behaviors may sound simplistic, but they are critical to building the foundation that you need to sustain an effective department. The more you can practice these suggestions on a daily basis, the healthier your organization will be.
If you would like to learn more about organizational development efforts and how they can improve the performance of your organization, contact Kammy Haynes.
For a PDF version of this newsletter, please click here. If you are unable to read pdf files, download the free Adobe Reader program.