What we’re reading this week:
The Internal Communicators Index: Trust Issue
Trust is a biggie. Hard to win, easy to lose and a primary reason why employees will back their leaders and offer them the full benefit of their unique talent. Or not.
Imagine an employee and technical genius comes up with a multi-million-pound idea. What makes the difference between them offering this up to management, versus taking it elsewhere?
And on a smaller scale, what makes your talented project manager stay with you through a tumultuous change process, when they could get a new job with one flick of their CV?
This is why we poured over every finding in the IC Index Trust issue, and here’s our top three takeaways:
It’s tough at the top: Employee trust in leadership decreases as the distance between the individual and the leader increases. In other words, trust in line managers is higher than senior leaders or CEOs. Interestingly, this correlates directly to your internal communication strategy: where internal communication is rated highly, so is trust in senior leaders.
People take it personally: Employees want to know how they are personally contributing to the end goal and why. As one senior leader and interviewee put it, ‘We can’t deliver on our strategy and achieve our goals without a workforce that understands and cares about what they do, and that feels heard and cared for themselves.’ We think ‘belonging’ has a big role to play here as well as clarity and transparency.
The power to positively position change is in your hands: How change is perceived by employees directly correlates to the quality of communication. Employees at the sticky end of change will retain trust if the quality of the communication is high. In other words, that stellar project manager of yours will stay with you if your communications is honest and has them and their future at the heart of it.
This report is jam packed with learning points and we could have shared our top 30 or even 300, but we know you have jobs to go to. As communicators, our chosen top 3 is not wholly new news, but it does underpin that even with new channels, AI and new ways of working, being employee-centric and consistent is key. The company story is not about you, it’s about them. Oh, and you may need a great communications team to help you tell it.
**Please note, these are our personal top-level takeaways. The full IC Index contains a lot more information and insights. It’s well worth a read, and you’ll need to be a member to access it. Big thanks to Institute of Internal Communication the for continuing to be the leading resource of internal communicators everywhere.
