Many employees “quietly quit” because trust in their employers has been shattered.
“Quiet quitting” has become the new buzzword used to describe employee disengagement. The term can be conceptualized as the phenomenon employees engage in when they feel undervalued and under-appreciated in their workplace. Rather than leaving the organization like what has been seen during the Great Resignation, employees will perform their job duties with the least amount of effort, doing the bare minimum, and without going above and beyond. Employees have taken back their power in a post-pandemic workplace, where many exhausted workers are realizing that their labor and efforts have been highly exploited. The push to return back to office has likely added fuel to the fire. Many employees from racially marginalized backgrounds may engage in “quiet quitting” because of high rates of race-based traumatic stress and burnout. Often employees “quietly quit” because trust in their employers has been shattered. This article will explore four ways to rebuild and employee trust when it’s been broken.
1. Acknowledgement of harm. Any organization that is trying to rebuild and repair the trust that has been damaged must first acknowledge the ways that employees have been harmed. In many cases, leadership is unaware of the specific ways employees feel they’ve been undervalued. It’s essential to gather employee feedback on a consistent and ongoing basis to gauge employee experiences. Introduce anonymous feedback systems to provide anonymity and to increase participation. Investigate trends and whether different employee groups (millennial employees, woman-identifying employees, Black employees, etc.) are sharing particular feedback. If the trust was severed because of a specific incident that occurred, the first step to rectifying harm is to acknowledge and understanding the ways that that specific event impacted employees.
2. Accountability. After acknowledging the ways that the organization has contributed to employee harm, there should be a root-cause analysis, which can be examined through an equity audit. This will help to determine who or what systems were at fault and how the harm was able to take place. Are there subjective promotion strategies being utilized for employee advancement? Was the harm a result of destructive leadership? Is there bias in who gets hired into the organization? A root-cause analysis will determine where the fault lies, which can provide guidance for how trust can be rebuilt. Many organizations that are called out for causing harm are desperate to move on and move forward without acknowledging what caused the harm. Having systems in place to prevent future harm is great and absolutely necessary but repairing broken trust will begin when organizational leaders are able to take ownership of the ways they’ve contributed to the broken trust. Leaders may not be the direct cause of harm but part of the job of those in power is to recognize how they’ve created a culture that allowed harm to persist, even if they aren’t the direct perpetrators of the harm.
3. Repairing Harm. Mending the trust that has been broken must extend beyond an apology, acknowledgement, and accountability. There must be specific actions to support those who have been harmed. If, for example, an employee has made multiple inflammatory remarks about another employee, repairing and rebuilding employee trust might requiring firing that employee. Often organizational statements don’t align with actions. After the murder of George Floyd, there were a plethora of proclamations about racial justice but specific actions to improve employee wellbeing have been less common. Based on employee feedback, you will gain a better idea of how employees would like harm to be repaired. Think about specific policies and practices that can be introduced. Is there bias in your hiring process? Think about adopting more anti-racist hiring practices to ensure equity. Are there workplace policies that are unintentionally discriminatory? Seek outside counsel to perform an assessment of company policies to evaluate for equity. Develop a series of metrics to assess these interventions over time to ensure that efforts are actually achieving desired results.
4. Sustained efforts. Trust in any relationship takes time to rebuild. After harm has been caused, it will take continued and sustained efforts to repair and for trust to be rebuilt. Think about how harm-intervention strategies will be sustained over time. Sometimes when new leadership enters or exists a company, the momentum and methods that were being utilized to rebuild and repair trust fall to the waste side. Rebuilding and repairing employee trust should not fall on one person like the chief human resource officer or the chief diversity officer. Trust cannot be rebuilt unless there is a collective effort, or at least a critical mass of employees and leaders working towards repair and restoration. Think about your short-term and long-term plans. Consistency is one of the necessary ingredients to rebuilding and repairing employee trust. One unconscious bias training, for example, is not going to change a long history of systemic issues that plague a workplace. Employers must truly commit to equity and justice in the workplace and that commitment should be followed be consistent actions.
