Decoding Trust at Work
How to build trusting work relationships and culture.
My work has always taken me to international environments. I once joined a company with employees of 66 different nationalities, and I’ve been in a few good spots throughout my career to observe how trust evolves (and dies) in various places.
This article is an attempt to describe trust in a way that fits as many (tech) work environments as possible (based on the ones that I’ve encountered) and provide a few ideas on how to strengthen it.
How trust affects a business
People hire other people for two reasons: they either don’t know how to do something or don’t have the time to do it.
Not being able to trust someone means paying two people (2 FTE) to get the output of (for example) around ~1.5 FTE, since one person has to spend time closely monitoring the other. As a team without sufficient trust grows, more and more monitoring overhead is needed, which increases the price of the team’s output.
But, if people in the team can trust each other they don’t spend much time on monitoring and micromanaging. It’s a much more productive environment.
Moreover, a simple delegation of work has limits and doesn’t scale. A person who assigns tasks needs to…
