# Transcript

DR. GRAHAM DIETZ: My name is Dr. Graham Dietz, and I work at Durham University Business School, and I'm also one of the partners at Crucial Connexions. And the research that I do and the consultancy that I do is all about what inspires trust inside the organisation. And it's about helping HR functions to understand more the dynamics of trust and how the dynamics of trust can help performance and employee well being.

There are multiple relationships that are going on inside organisations, but also outside organisations. All of them rely on trust. Trust is crucial for HRM, because everything that HR does is about building that trusting relationship between the employee and the employer. The way in which you appraise people the way in which you pay people, the way in which you train people, the job design, even recruitment and selection.

All of this is about building a trusting relationship between the employee and the employer. And so HR has a vital role to play in enhancing trust levels inside the organisation. And if the employees feel that they are trusted and they in turn trust their managers, they can reciprocate in kind with superior customer service, sales, innovation. There are a number of key metrics that have been proven to have a decisive link with employee trust.

Trust suffuses all of these commercial relationships. And if we can understand better how trust is built and how trust is maintained, we can manage those relationships better and that will help business to thrive. If you trust somebody, you have confident reliance in them in conditions of risk and uncertainty. Several studies have shown now that if people trust their leaders, they reciprocate in kind with demonstrating superior customer service, which translates into better sales, which translates into better performance.

We worked with a leading housing agency in London and we trained the entire workforce, from the senior executive team down to the maintenance staff, in what trust is and how trust is so important for their working relationships and their working performance. And within three months of that training, staff satisfaction had gone up, customer satisfaction had gone up. And when they looked at the key performance indicators for maintenance and for dealing with customer complaints, for example, they found that the organisation had become more efficient, more effective, and also understood much more about the customer needs and was much more responsive.

There was a tangible impact within three months of the Trust Training Programme, and that's some of the things that we can offer. I think trust is absolutely crucial to the way in which all organisations function. All organisations thrive and rely on the relationships that they have internally and the relationships that they have externally. Without trust, you have no business.