You cannot possibly take away trust when building a foremost relationship in the workplace. And your plans towards streamlining the effective coexistence of employees and HR will require that relationship that makes HR an easy go-to for every employee.
Like customer trust for your business, trust with your employees is important to engineer an effective workplace experience. You want to ensure a plausible trust level between staff and with the assistance of HR systems, they can provide an avenue of open communication between both parties where they both know everything that is occurring throughout the business.
A recent survey about the lack of HR trust has been able to establish what your employees could be thinking about HR and the can-do strategy HR can implement to improve their trust level.
Fairness Can Go a Long Way in Ensuring Trust
Trust in the workplace is not merely a matter of doing what is right, or at least considered right. It also means HR must be able to present themselves when needed and provide employees with problem-solving channels and resources.
With one-third of employees thinking that receiving assistance from HR is hard or nearly impossible, you want to ensure strategies that eliminate distrust and become available to every level of employee to respond to queries and other concerns.
This is particularly important since there are still areas for concern that employees have such as the following aspects:
- Information about internal promotion opportunities.
Perhaps, your employees feel they are being unfairly treated when it comes to being recognised for promotion. Due to these fears and the unhealthy rapport with HR, 48% of employees believe they cannot trust HR to notify them about internal promotion opportunities.
- Conflict resolution.
Your employees may not trust HR to manage internal conflict with other members. At least 47% of the survey respondents are not sure or believe that they cannot trust HR when it comes to conflict management in the organisation.
- Privacy and confidentiality.
In the case of personal data, employees find it difficult to trust their HR. The survey also shows as many as 31% of your employees may not trust HR to respect their privacy and confidentiality.
- Favouritism and One-Sided Attention
Favouritism could be eating deeper in your organisation, and perceived favouritism poses trust issues. Depending on how your HR department operates, employees feel left out in the plans and might think their superiors earn undeserving recognition for their hard work.
Meanwhile, fewer than 50% of respondents felt that they trusted their HR to perform impartially and they perceived that 43% of senior staff get favoured more compared to the 12% of junior staff.
How to Improve Employee HR Trust Levels
- Refined Manner of Communication
Communication is effective in all business ramifications and also fosters trust. Where there is a disconnect and, perhaps, no touchpoint for an employee to reach for problem resolution, they become stressed and discourage their level of engagement.
With 54.1% of employees still having the same level of trust for HR post-pandemic, you want to rework your strategy for effective communication to keep employees from slipping into the 13.8% that now have less trust for HR.
- Build a Link Between Employees and HR
Like superiors who do not recognise some juniors, juniors can also fail to recognise HR team members. Employee recognition of HR team members can be vital because many of your employees will trust HR if they recognise them.
For example, the survey shows 66% of employees would recognise a member of the HR team and trust them to manage and resolve conflicts with other members.
- Champion Diversity
Cezanne’s survey shows that HR championing diversity experiences higher employee trust. When you champion diversity, at least 67% of employees will trust your HR team to manage conflict with other staff well. 65% of your employees can trust HR to notify them of internal opportunities and 50% will trust HR to be impartial in their dealing with senior and junior staff.
