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Trust is the basis of any valuable relationship with friends and family, employees and employers, customers and suppliers, and among partners. You entrust these parties to enrich your life, business, and growth. They entrust you to do the same. Trust is reciprocal. In particular, businesses rely on (a) customers to fund salaries, budgets, and dividends; (b) employees to create what customers need; and (c) partners to deliver what customers need.

Trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

What’s the state of trust today?

Customers: 68% of consumers say trust is more important to them now and 40% of consumers have stopped buying from a brand they previously loved because they don’t trust the company, according to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust, the New Brand Equity. Nearly two-thirds of customers choose, switch, avoid, or boycott a brand based on its stand on societal issues. Customers and the media are complaining about “skimpflation“, calling out brands for cutting back on services that once were table stakes.

Employees: Among non-managers, only 45% feel their relationship with their leaders is good, dropping 17 points since 2020, according to Adecco Group’s 2021 study, Resetting Normal: Defining the New Era of Work. Only 33% feel they are getting due recognition for their contributions within the business. 42% say their managers are meeting expectations for supporting their work/life balance, and 37% say their leaders are succeeding at encouraging a good working environment and team culture.

Value: Clearly, value is eroding in the exodus of employees and customers. Knowledge and continuity are walking out the door as employees shift their allegiance. Costs of marketing and sales rise to replace lost customers. Is trust the answer to recuperating at-risk and lost value?

In comparison to distrusted brands, the trusted brands are 7X more likely to command a premium price and they garner a 14% greater purchasing propensity, as reported by Edelman’s 2020 research. Trusted brands benefit from 6X consumer loyalty and are 7X more likely to get consumers to share their personal data with them. They’re 8X more resilient and their stock outperforms its sector by up to 11% in times of crisis.

What exactly is trust?

For customers and employees and partners: The Edelman report says businesses have missed vital cues by failing to monitor trust. Important distinctions exist between:

• Sentiment: a moment-in-time feeling.
• Reputation: characterization by a critical mass of people.
• Trust: a personal orientation towards a company that is manifest in a willingness to take a meaningful risk with that company.

Trust is the foundation of all deep and meaningful personal relationships and gives you the confidence to bet your future on someone. — Edelman

Trustworthiness is not the same as trustability, as asserted by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in their book, Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits.

1. Trustworthy means you behave in accordance with laws and industry norms, with accurate pricing, maintaining quality and reliability, and generally, doing what you say you’ll do.
2. Trustability means you proactively do things right and do the right thing. Trustable leaders view each customer/member/donor/taxpayer and employee and partner (i.e. stakeholders, collectively) like a tiny bundle of future cash flow with a memory.
   

   A trustable organization:

   • Designs its business model purposely so as to ensure that whatever’s best for the stakeholder is financially better for the organization, overall.
   • Follows through on the spirit of what it promises by proactively looking out for its stakeholders’ interests.
   • Recognizes that what people say about the brand is far more important than anything the organization says about itself.
   • Seeks to ensure that stakeholders want to remain loyal because they know the organization watches out for them and acts in their interest.
   • Uses stakeholder analytics to balance its quarterly profits against changes in its stakeholders’ long-term value.

A value proposition is inherent in both formal and informal arrangements between companies and their customers, their employees, and their partners: do X for me and you’ll get Y. Whenever X or Y is misrepresented or changed, trust may be in jeopardy. Any mismatch between X and Y is called the brand-customer gap. It’s also a major contributor to The Great Reshuffle.

Businesses are missing vital cues by failing to monitor performance to the value proposition. I recommend adopting the Experience Value Quotient for CX, EX, and PX (customer, employee, and partner experience), to indicate demerits whenever what’s promised differs from what’s delivered.

The global pandemic has introduced many changes in X and Y in the workplace and the marketplace. Consequently, discontent among workers, customers, and partners has piled on further change and stress. It has highlighted that there’s more to X and Y than money and perks. The value proposition of X and Y revolves around trust that each parties’ intended outcomes will be fulfilled.

Intended outcomes are each party’s reasons for accepting the value proposition. Notably, employees are seeking a better fit with their values and lifestyle, in addition to competitive wages and career advancement, as seen in the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: The Belief-Driven Employee.

These intended outcomes are employees’ Y in the value proposition of “do X for me and you’ll get Y”. The Great Reshuffle reflects workers’ heightened realization of their intended outcomes’ importance in their lives.

What are you doing to uncover the intended outcomes of employees, customers, and partners? Change your listening and data collection to discover and monitor intended outcomes. For example, customers typically say “I was trying to do A, then B happened, and now C is my consequence”. Identifying patterns in these statements is the first step to creating expectations personas.

Expectations personas are different from buyer personas. There are typically 2-4 expectations personas for a brand, and they describe intended outcome, moments of truth, performance standards, show-stoppers, and consequences and costs of missing the mark. For these reasons, expectations personas are meaningful and actionable for every group in your enterprise’s ecosystem. They’re vital to experience excellence among customers, employees, and partners. They’re essential to organizational nimbleness.

How can you improve trust?

• Start with high-potential customers’, employees’, and partners’ intended outcomes. You must win and maintain their trust.
• Guide managers’ listening skills for stepping up their ability to identify and support their staff’s needs.
• Shift from a telling to an asking culture in your department and your whole organization.
• Be transparent, with accurate information to build and maintain trust. 
• Your credibility, reliability, and confide-ability must outweigh your self-orientation.