Building Forward With Confidence: How to Establish Trust Among Employees

As we look to enter a new era of hybrid work, instilling mutual trust with employees is an essential step in order to develop a collaborative and respectful working environment. But as the saying goes, trust can take years to build and only a moment to destroy. That means leaders must work hard to shape a culture that encourages employees to speak up when they identify any issues or concerns and share their feedback in a constructive way. 

Let’s discuss some ideas about how that’s done.

To remain viable in a fast and competitive world, organizations first and foremost need to create a culture of trust. We must earn and maintain the trust of our customers, our communities, and our employees.

You can foster a strong, inclusive culture by following a few key principles:

• Speak up: It’s important for people to be themselves and bring their whole selves to work. We must prioritize adding diverse voices into conversations so there’s healthy debate and collaboration. That’s why it’s also important for compliance teams to make sure there are multiple avenues for employees to speak up, and that people feel heard and respected. Groups get to better decisions when members can represent multiple viewpoints. Companies that have strong “speak up” policies and programs are stronger for it.

• Connect and communicate: How do companies build a sense of connection and inclusion when faced with a hybrid working environment? We all have a need for human connection, and it’s important to keep those connections strong with intentional actions. Holding consistent team meetings can be helpful, and bringing interesting speakers can help spark conversation and learning. But it’s also incredibly valuable to set up one-on-one meetings with individuals to see how they’re feeling and get their input on things. Additionally, make inclusivity a core value and be visible about it. Expand holiday calendars, create events and initiatives focusing on inclusion, model inclusive language, and encourage a culture of frequent check-ins, safe spaces, and opportunities for conversations, including factoring in different styles of communication. At Zoom, we have also created employee resource groups as another channel for speaking up and for the community. 

• Focus on meaningful results: Every employee at a company is part of something bigger than themselves. They help generate real results that impact customers in need of help. Find ways to help remind people that they belong and show how they contribute to support the mission and drive results. Leaders should communicate how our choices matter and can positively impact customers, communities, and employees alike. 

As you work to sustain trust within your organization, you need to be transparent about what’s required of employees to secure the everywhere workforce — which means providing them with the right training. Implement tailored, risk-based training and awareness programs, as well as efficient, thorough processes designed to keep both privacy and security related-issues top of mind. By equipping employees with the skills they need to be successful, you’re showing them you trust they can prioritize privacy and security while enjoying the flexibility of a hybrid environment.

Having the right employee engagement tools in place can also help you nurture trust, and Zoom is one way to accomplish that. Zoom is the trusted communications platform that enables people to work from where they can be happiest and most productive: the office, home, or a mix of both.

We maintain that trust by providing a secure platform for our users. For example, Zoom platform users can take advantage of these key Zoom security and privacy features:

• Encryption: 256-bit AES-GCM encryption helps protect the crucial information shared across Zoom solutions, which is also used in the optional end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature. When enabled, E2EE helps encrypt communication between all meeting participants using cryptographic keys known only to the devices of those participants. This means that no third party — including Zoom — has access to the meeting’s private keys.

• Meeting security controls: Hosts can use passcodes, Waiting Rooms, and in-meeting security controls to help safeguard their Zoom Meeting from uninvited guests.

• Dedicated privacy features: Zoom has released a number of dedicated privacy features, which include consent from meeting participants for when a host requests to unmute them, the ability to require only authenticated users to join meetings, new in-product privacy notifications that make it easier for users to understand who can see, save, and share their content and information when they join meetings and experiences hosted on Zoom, and more. 

As Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan said, “No vision for a sustainable organization can be realized without creating a culture of trust. Our workforce and customers are in constant motion – working across apps, devices, locations. The solutions we pick need to be able to flex to support them wherever they are, while providing constant levels of security and privacy without getting in the way of productivity.”

By prioritizing workers’ digital well-being and creating a culture where it’s safe to speak up and raise concerns, we foster a resilient culture that creates connections among employees, no matter where they’re working from. Trust empowers everyone to do their best work, preparing us to embrace whatever change is still ahead.

To learn more about how companies can embrace the next phase of work, visit our Building Forward webpage.