We’re approaching year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, with no clear end in sight. During this time, companies have had to make difficult decisions about whether employees should work from home, wear masks in the office, and get vaccinated and tested. Many companies that took a financial hit also struggled with whether to lay off or furlough employees. Business leaders have had to make tough calls amid rapidly changing conditions with official guidance that keeps changing, and their decisions have run the gamut from trust building to trust breaking.
For example, Cathy Merrill, CEO of the Washingtonian magazine, said in an opinion piece last May that employees working from home should worry about keeping their jobs. She noted “if the employee is rarely around,” there is a “strong incentive to change their status to contractor.” The essay generated so much outrage that Merrill was forced to retrench and soften the piece.
In the wake of such decisions, leaders are left needing to rebuild trust with a workforce that’s already been battered. Moreover, trust repair is an opportunity to rebuild stronger trust.
Three steps to rebuilding trust
Research at Fidelity Investments, where one of us served as a senior quality officer, found that customers who had experienced a problem that was successfully resolved by Fidelity were more satisfied than customers who had never had a problem with the firm. The key finding: lost trust can be recovered.
Knowing that many of the decisions business leaders made during the pandemic fractured their relationship with employees, we recommend managers take these three steps to rebuild trust and, ultimately, loyalty:
1. Take responsibility. First, companies need to acknowledge and take responsibility for actions that negatively affected employees, including unintended impacts. Acknowledging these impacts demonstrates that leaders recognize that their decisions have had real consequences and are aware of what employees have endured, which is the first step in repairing trust.
A series of research studies from Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Julian Zlatev found that verbally acknowledging other people’s emotions, particularly their negative ones, builds trust. In one of the studies, participants who commented on negative emotions were rated up to 20 percent more trustworthy. Internally, companies need to figure out how to share in taking responsibility, since there is a role for senior leaders who made the decisions as well as the managers who carried them out, and trust needs to be repaired at both levels.
2. Explain the company’s actions. Second, leaders need to explain their actions. In a 2016 study, researchers found that the most effective apologies acknowledged responsibility, explained why the action happened, and offered to fix the damage. Be transparent with employees. Provide the context around why a decision was made, the alternatives management weighed, the pros and cons, and the difficulty in making tough calls so employees can understand the logic that senior leaders used. In a 2021 study by Future Forum, 66 percent of executives said they were being very transparent about post-pandemic policies, but only 42 percent of employees agreed.
3. Offer to fix the problem. Finally, leaders need to make an offer of repair. Researchers studying apologies found one of the most effective elements of an apology is an offer to repair the problem. We’ve found offers of repair are essential to long-term trust recovery. After all, the most essential part of trust recovery is fixing the problem.
Get direct input from employees on what they need. This may seem obvious, but in the 2021 Future Forum survey, 66 percent of executives reported they developed their post-pandemic workforce policies with little to no input from employees.
Develop action plans based on employee feedback
In order to ensure the feedback is meaningful, consider asking employees these three questions:
- What was your experience with COVID?
- What grade would you give us for managing COVID, and why?
- What is the most important challenge we face in meeting your needs in a post-pandemic world?
Based on this information, companies should put together action plans at two levels: team and individual. First, at the team level, managers should ensure that each new policy also has a mechanism for receiving feedback and can be adjusted so policies are fair and beneficial, rather than creating unintended harm. For example, requiring a certain amount of in-office work while the pandemic is raging can unintentionally penalize people who are immunocompromised or who have immunocompromised people in their household.
On the individual level, managers should work with employees to address their specific concerns and figure out what support they need. For example, a team member may wish to have flexibility in their work schedules when school starts and ends to get their children settled. The ability to schedule meetings around those times can enable them to do their best work.
COVID has changed our reality, and not every decision leaders make will be the right one. In fact, leaders will undoubtedly make some bad calls that lose trust, or a workplace policy may unintentionally cause harm. However, companies can work to rectify lost trust and correct mistakes. After all, trust once broken can be rebuilt, and when it is rebuilt successfully, it can come back even stronger.
Sandra J. Sucher is the MBA Class of 1966 Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and served as vice president of corporate quality at Fidelity Investments, where she worked for 12 years. Shalene Gupta is a research associate at HBS. They co-authored the new book The Power of Trust: How Companies Earn It, Lose It, Regain It.
[Image: iStockphoto/martin-dm]
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