The importance of trust in the workplace in 2020
By Carolin von der Mosel, People Manager
Last Saturday, I found myself with a takeaway coffee in the park, reflecting on:
- My biggest learnings of 2020: surviving lockdown
- What I’m most proud of in 2020: surviving lockdown
- What I’ll focus on next year: you better not plan!
I paused to reflect on what I wrote the same time last year about my many ambitions and thought “If I had known what would happen….” It’s been a year of ups and downs. Life has never been this challenging, vulnerable and intense.
I’m the mum of a three year old boy and from March to June, with daycare centres closed, I had to work from home while entertaining my toddler. I read the other day that “Working from home with kids is like brushing your teeth with Nutella”. That pretty much sums up my experience; it was definitely the hardest feat for me this year.
Whilst juggling work and kids at the same time in the same space is beyond challenging, I also feel that 2020 has been a time of deep connection with my team. The new normal is no longer only defined by washing your hands a million times a day, wearing a mask, limiting social interactions and living with uncertainties. The new normal has also become about learning to express concerns, showing your vulnerabilities and talking about your feelings.
2020 has been the year where you and your colleagues have learned the most from each other. They learned about you and the style of your living room, and you learned about the colour of their pyjamas and their kids’ tantrums. Although we’ve been physically separated for months, I’ve never felt closer to them. Actually, 2020 has enabled us to create an environment of trust without having actively planned it.
I took a sip of my coffee, crossed out “What I’m most proud of in 2020: s̶u̶r̶v̶i̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶l̶o̶c̶k̶d̶o̶w̶n̶” and jotted down: “Creating an environment of trust within my team”.
Luckily, we’re now in December and schools and kindergartens are open in many parts of the world. As working parents, we get a chance to separate work and family a little more. Indeed, working from home and removing the stress and time of commuting to the office can give us more time and mental space to spend with our kids.
This work flexibility is priceless in all situations! Both kids and Coronavirus are unpredictable: when you think a difficult wave is over, the next one is just around the corner. Having the option to run to school in order to pick up a sick child or start later in the morning to drop them off at school is critical for a working parent. As a result, the discussion around the benefits of flexible work is gaining centre stage and that’s directly related to the impact Coronavirus has had on the nature of work.
Through working in HR, I’ve observed that flexibility is often perceived as a benefit for employees and not for companies, and it’s usually only limited to working from home and offering flexible work hours. Having flexibility as a working mum is invaluable and I DO consider it as a perk at Adevinta. However, I think there’s much more to flexibility than being able to drop the pen at 4.30pm to run to school. Flexibility is not only the ability to have a flexible timetable; it’s an attitude that I prefer to call “autonomy”.
By being the owners of our time, not only are we more motivated to complete our tasks but this autonomy can also lead to better results and a feeling of fulfillment. Being able to work from home and be flexible when it comes to working times is a nice foundation, but autonomy is also about creating an environment where employees are able to set their own goals and work out their own approach to the solution. It’s also about encouraging experimentation, trying new things, allowing failure in a safe environment and creating a culture of continuous feedback. In order for all of this to work, it needs one main ingredient and that is trust! Trust enables holistic flexibility.
On the other side of the equation is work outcome, which is often positive for the company. Exchanging flexibility for work outcomes seems to be a bargaining chip. However, as with flexibility, I think trust is an enabler for productivity. It’s proven that employees who trust one another are more productive and more likely to collaborate to problem-solve. It has also been shown that high-trust organisations are two and a half times more likely to be high-performing revenue companies when compared to their low-trust counterparts. Trust, precisely that ingredient we’ve been building as a team during lockdown, has the potential to merge flexibility and productivity into one, as opposed to reducing it to a bargaining chip.
“Trust is the linking element between performance and flexibility,” I noted down in my journal. I went back to my 2020 reflection page and crossed out “My biggest learnings of 2020: S̶u̶r̶v̶i̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶l̶o̶c̶k̶d̶o̶w̶n̶” and changed it to: “Learning what real flexibility means and applying it”.
Then I thought, “Why did this learning about trust happen exponentially in 2020?” I laughed, remembering my boss’s pyjama colour and my colleagues’ kids’ tantrums during an important meeting. Seeing your manager in a tough spot, struggling to manage kids in a meeting, only makes you feel more empathetic and connected, and ultimately contributes to more trust between colleagues.
There was still a thought wandering in my mind: “There’s way more 2020 taught us on how to build trust.” Apart from opening up your home and introducing your kids to your colleagues, here are some key learnings from my Adevinta team on how to establish trust and make it a key enabler for employee performance and flexibility — based around our four key behaviours.
1. Say it like it is and treat feedback as a gift
Open communication and a Radical Candor feedback culture enables trust and personal growth. This year wasn’t about hiding behind our screens, but saying it like it is. We run a Radical Candor training day and in 2020 alone almost 500 Adevintans learned how to give and receive constructive feedback. More importantly, we put that learning into practice by virtually growing our feedback muscle. Both recognition and feedback have helped us grow and at the same time, build our trust with each other.
2. Win and lose together and don’t be a jerk
Organisational support and transparency in communication were key in 2020. We’ve been sharing team efforts, putting together videos and celebrating our wins widely. But that’s the easy part! The truth is that you can only build real trust if you know how to lose together. This year has shown us how important it is to support each other, mourn our losses and share our difficult moments in the middle of the lockdown. Regular check-ins with our teams and virtual sessions on mental health is how we got through tough times. We learned that a key ingredient for trust is intimacy, which is why we openly shared our genuine feelings and concerns.
3. Get stuff done and keep your promises
Getting stuff done is all about being reliable. Trust disappears quickly if you find out you can’t rely on people. This year has been tough for many of us and sometimes we had to admit that doing “business as usual” wasn’t always the best way of doing things. We learned to slow down and make realistic promises.
4. Always be learning fast, learn from the data and try again
Learning from mistakes is closely related to autonomy. Learning to do things differently and adapting different approaches and processes is what 2020 was all about. There’s never one single way of doing it right. By recognising this, you — as an organisation — can correct mistakes, do everything you can to make it work and ultimately create trust.
It was getting dark in the park and as I was slowly packing my stuff to head back home, I thought “And what about the last point? What will I focus on next year?” It was clear to me that the only thing that is constant is change, and that’s applicable to every aspect of our lives: our family life, business life and wider social changes. So, how can we be prepared?
“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it!” My eyes wandered to the quote of the month in my journal and I thought: “Thanks, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
“What I’ll focus on next year: Y̶o̶u̶ ̶b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶n̶ #BeTheChange”
Special thanks to Liz Kalnin and Jasper de Lange.
