With businesses adopting a hybrid model post-COVID, it’s important, now more than ever, to have trust and confidence in your team.
Distance can be a barrier to building trust, especially when your employees are working from home. The lack of face-to-face connection is currently a huge obstacle for developing deeper relationships in the workplace.
Recent research shows that 59% of employees had experienced micromanagement in the workplace. Micromanagement can often cause further implications, including increase of employee turnover and challenges when it comes to hiring new candidates.
Why trust is important
The relationship between employers and their employees is essential to productivity and workflow. Low trust in leadership has been linked to low employee engagement and has even led to ‘quiet quitting’. A decrease in employee engagement results in a decrease in quality client work – potentially leading to poor client service.
As of January 2023, 83% of 3000 UK businesses want their employees back to working in the office at least three days per week. However, from an employee point of view, many feel as if they’re being asked to work in the office for managers to monitor their productivity.
How integrated systems can help
To maintain a positive and productive team, employees need to see that their leaders value and appreciate them. Employee trust and engagement is dependent on employees being seen, heard and supported – rather than feeling like ‘just another number’.
• Communication:
Employee trust can be broken when employers fail to communicate. As a manager, ensure you’re clarifying your expectations to your team from day one. Remember, your employees can’t read your mind, so make sure they’re aware of what needs doing, and by when.
Integrated systems allow you to communicate openly with your team. Job scheduling enables your team to see the tasks they need to get done, and within which timeframes. This results in less micromanaging, as you’ve communicated clearly which tasks need doing and their deadlines.
Even when addressing any issues or concerns you may have with your employees, having straight up conversations right from the start of a project can instantly improve trust and morale within your team. By making it clear what you wish your employees to achieve, you’re empowering them to work at their best.
• Support:
Employees often look to their leaders for reassurance and support, especially in times of trouble. As a manager, it’s important to look out for signs of team members feeling overstretched or underperforming.
Timesheets enable you to review if your team is overworking or overperforming, as time utilisation and resourcing allows you to anticipate if additional capacity is needed.
This data can assist regular employee reviews, proving that you support your team by adjusting or workloads or time plans based on their submitted timesheets.
• Independence:
One of the signs of micromanagement is asking your team for continuous updates. If your employees feel they constantly need to justify themselves with what they’re doing every minute of the day, they can often feel that they’re not trusted to do their jobs properly.
As it can be time consuming having to refer to multiple systems to get what you need, an integrated system streamlines all your process into one place, ensuring all documents and data are easily accessible.
With everything in one place, this results in less time spent on admin, providing your employees with more time to focus on getting tasks done.
Although it can be hard to overcome these challenges, remember that trusting your team is essential for supporting your business’ growth. With trust, you can increase employee engagement and retention, leading to more internal progression and promotions for your employees.
Building trust will implement a more long-term assured environment for your team and future employees.
Get in touch for more information about how software can improve trust in your team.