7 Ways to Increase Trust in Your Organization

We are in a war for talent. But with organizational trust at an all-time low, how will we attract the talent we need, let alone keep the people we have? And that's coming up next on Marc Haine Live.

Hi!

Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create those jaw-dropping, show-stopping experiences that our customers and our employees deserve. I am your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. And today, I'd like to discuss trust and what we need to do to rethink trust in our organizations and within our leadership team. We will talk about how to leverage trust to enhance employee engagement, retention, and enhance your overall business results. So, stick with me today. I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. If you're here live with me, do drop in your comments and questions and we will try to address it here. If you are watching the replay, feel free to put the comments in the comment box below and we will make a point of addressing it. If you would like something deeper, if you would like to dig a little bit deeper into today's topic, you can opt in for a 30-minute complimentary coaching session with me. Go ahead and book yourself some time on my online calendar at meetwithmarqhaine.com. There are a lot of things we as leaders have no control over. We have no control over COVID, global unrest, supply chain issues, heck, even fuel prices. We just have no control. We can't control the labor shortage that seems to be affecting virtually every sector in North America. But we do have control over the reasons why people are leaving us and going to other companies. We even have control of them going over to our other competitors. If we can keep them in-house, we have control over that. So, I'd like to know from you our Question of the Day. They say that people don't quit their jobs. They quit their bosses. How as a leader have you tweaked your environment to build higher trust within your organization and with your employees? I'd love to hear some of your strategies and some of your thoughts. So, why don't you go ahead and share this episode on your favorite platform and hashtag the post with #ExperienceLeadership. I'd love to be part of this conversation with you. The media is chock-full of reports about labor shortages all over. We constantly are hearing healthcare is short of staff. The passport offices are short of staff. The airlines are short of staff. Truth be told, even before the pandemic, the reports coming out of the labor markets were saying that by 2025, we would have labor shortages in virtually all industries, especially as the baby boomers retire. I remember about 8 years ago, that was the big talk was we were analyzing. At the time, I was in hospitality analyzing the industry and saying by 2025, how short we're going to be. We were going to be over 100,000 people short in the industry as people were retiring and moving on. But the pandemic sped all that up. It also threw a wrench in the works on how we engaged and retained our employees. It forced us to adapt to a new way of working and a new way of thinking. And it gave us new sets of expectations, not only from the employer perspective but from the employee perspective as well. We learned very quickly if our bosses trusted us or not. If they did, when we were forced to work from home, they handed us our laptops, created a communication schedule, and sent us on our way. If they didn't trust us, it became crystal clear. They scrambled to install tracking software on our computers and create check-in systems to prove that we were doing what we were supposed to be doing when we were supposed to be doing it. The ultimate test. of trust from our employees was if since they had no problem thanking us for the great work we did when we were forced to work from our bedrooms, our living rooms, and our patios, they met with us after we were invited to come back to discuss our work preferences. They invite us to choose how, when, and If we would like to return to the office. That was the ultimate test of trust. Unfortunately, that was the exception and not the rule. So today, I'd like to define trust as leaders. How can we better take steps to build and support trust in our organization? What is this thing called trust? In his book, The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey defines trust as confidence. He tests it against the opposite of suspicion. His premise is that if you have confidence in your doctor, you're not going to have suspicion about your doctor. If you have trust in the airline industries to accept your booking, you're not going to be suspicious that they might cancel your flight or you will get there and Things will happen. Suspicion is the antithesis, I think, of lack of trust. It is the definition in our workplaces of really low trust. And you can even say, even low morale. When you think about a gossipy workplace where people are by the lunchroom or by the water cooler and people looking over and go, I bet you they're talking about me. Or people are bitching and bellyaching about stuff quietly and you walk into a room and people stop talking. That suspicion kicks in and it's like, where is your level of trust at this point? And so, I found that to be a really compelling definition, which It makes sense because Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines trust as assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. Now, that definition is absolutely jam-packed with so many components for one sentence. So, let me just repeat it and break it out for you. It defines it as being assured reliance. So, there's Stephen Covey's Competence. So, it's the assured reliance on the character. So, a character is who the person is, how we define them. Character mixes your capacity with other aspects, your values, and so on. And then so, it's on the character and the ability. So, ability measures— is measured in competency. When you have ability in something, you have the competency. In his book, when he talks about if you have high trust for your doctor, for your surgeon, but he has low competency in being able to do your brain surgery, it doesn't matter how much you trust him. You don't want him cracking open your skull. So, competency is a big one. And then, strength was another component of that definition. And so, strength becomes that Stick-to-it-ness of your belief systems and standing up for what's right in spite of what you might get back as a pushback. And then of course, the last component of that definition is truth of someone or something. And who defines that truth? We all have our own truths based on our perceptions. I could tell you my truth about certain things. But other people would have a different truth. And I think this is much different from righteousness. I did a virtues pick one day and I talked about righteousness that I didn't really feel that righteousness was really a virtue. It definitely wasn't a positive virtue from my perspective because of the amount of self-grandiose kind of pushing that one would do when you're righteous. And so, this idea of one's truth, if you're living one's truth, nobody can really fault you for it even though it might be wrong. We've had lots of things coming up during the pandemic. Different kinds of factions. Obviously in the States, we have far right, far left, middle. It's all people trying to isolate and push their truths with one side looking at the other and saying, those people are on crack. I don't know what the heck they're talking about. And they keep pushing forward with this. If we had high trust, that truth would— we would be better prepared to listen to that truth. I have to say, as far as definitions were concerned, since I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People way back in the '90s, I've always subscribed to measuring trust as a bank account. Stephen Covey, the father of Stephen M.R. Covey who wrote The Speed of Trust, wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And I really kind of resonated with this idea of a trust bank account. And so, this trust bank account basically says that if we treat trust like we're making deposits and withdrawals, I think we become a lot more intentional. Every single time that we are face-to-face with people, Every time we do a transaction with somebody, we build, maintain, or withdraw trust from a bank account. And in one of my presentations that I do for organizations is I talk about the effect that we have as consumers. A perfect example would be if you walked into a restaurant, brand new restaurant, first time anybody's been there. You're excited that it's a new restaurant in your community. You go, you have a great meal. It's fantastic. And you think, wow, this is so good that we finally have a restaurant that's so good, so wonderful. This is going to be great. And you go back another time and you go, wow, this is, you know, it's meeting my expectations. This is just wonderful. I love this. The trust goes up because they're making deposits into this trust bank account. You decide, you know what? You're going to bring a colleague to you and just brag about this great restaurant that you found. And you bring the colleague and you have lunch one day. And it's like, oh, that was just okay. Hmm, I wonder what happened. It wasn't as great as it used to be like the 2 other times. And so from there, you withdraw a little bit in the trust bank account. Does that mean that the next time you want to go to that restaurant, you'll say, no, I had one bad thing. I'm never gonna go? Well, it depends how bad it was. But chances are, if you've had 2 great experiences with it and 1 not so great experience, you're going to say, you know what? I'll give them a try again. Just see what happens. And you go back and it's mediocre at best. And you think to yourself, I wonder if something changed. I wonder what happened to the owners who were so passionate about this business. And it's just not meeting my expectations anymore. The withdrawal happens again. Now, here's the magical thing. When you're even Steven, you're in a very precarious position. It's like a little bit of a tightrope. As soon as you withdraw from and you're overdrawn on the trust bank account, well then, you're killing relationships. And this is typically what happens in businesses, isn't it? I remember back in 1999 when Gail and I moved our kids to our community. We had just flown into Alberta and the very next day, we decided to take the kids out for For supper. And we went to a restaurant and it was a horrible experience. We were left for 2 hours still waiting for food. They brought our appetizers out after about a half hour. The kids were antsy. They were little at the time. And you know what? Since then, we have never ever been back because the trust was withdrawn to such a degree because they didn't care that we had families with 3 young children. They didn't care that we were left there for 2 hours waiting for the food that came out eventually being absolutely mediocre. Or even below that. And so, we decided at that point, you know what? The withdrawal was so vast that we never went back again. So, it begs the question, can you build back trust? And I think there's a big it depends. It takes a lot of investment to build back trust. It takes a lot of effort to mend bridges that you've destroyed in it. So, the best that we can hope for is if we do end up overdrawn, that we are able to have the humility and the fortitude to be able to build that back. So, I'd like to delve into what you can do to build trust and get to looking into yourself first before we talk about organizational trust. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Uh, oops. There are so many different resources out there to talk about trust. I did cite this book, The Speed of Trust, and Stephen M.R. Covey, who is the son of the late Dr. Stephen Covey, wrote a second book called Smart Trust. If this is a topic that interests you, I thoroughly recommend that you get these books and dig a little bit into it. He does a really great job of peeling back different aspects of trust. But there are so many aspects to trust. So many ways that it can go wrong. It can absolutely feel like a ripple. It starts with you. I mean, regardless of your role, whatever you do touches other people. Then, they go and they touch other people and so on. Trust is like that. And if you are in your business and you're in a lunchroom and somebody gossips to you or has some sort of a negative feedback on somebody within your environment and they whisper it to you, you have a choice. You can take that negative gossip and negative thing and you could spread it. Or you can be the barrier that stops it in its tracks. It Trust builds on your strength of character to stand up for what's right and what you believe in. Working for a municipal government, I had to tell you, was a real eye-opener for me. I didn't realize how dysfunctional trust could be. Each department seems siloed from one another. And you add to that that governments are inherently low-trust organizations. I mean, the public has to trust council. And so, the big question is, do you trust politicians? Right? And so, this becomes the big challenge in municipalities because in municipalities, the council answers to the population, to their citizens, to their customers. And the council has to trust the administration to be able to do what's best for the community. And the Administration then has to trust their departments. And the departments then have to trust the people who work within those departments. And so, the thing with governments is that you have a whole population out there that's judging every aspect of what's going on. If a person makes a mistake in one of the departments, it ripples all the way up because then you have town council who has an agenda to be able to maintain face, get re-elected, and make sure that they are exuding the most trust that they can to their electorate. The administration has to look at people who and deal with the council who aren't trained to do what they do. But they are answerable to their budgets. They're answerable to anything that goes on within the confines of that organization to town council. And so, you end up with a lot of this push-me-pull-you environments within municipalities. And it clashes many, many different times because you end up with, especially if you have low trust, where you have people in administration going, oh, council doesn't know what they're doing. They don't know our reality. And then, council's like, oh, we want all these things to happen in our community and administration doesn't know anything about that. And then, administration is back there and they're like, oh my goodness, if council could work, One day in our organization, they see how hard we work. And council's like, you know what? We have to cut back. We have to roll back taxes. We have to cut taxes. We have to cut. What services can we cut? What can we do? And administration's like, you want us to do all this with no money? And it just keeps on going and going. So, we know trust in our organization is a challenge. And it seems like sometimes, the bigger the organization, the more of a challenge it is. But I've seen trust be a challenge in very small intimate businesses with only 5 employees. So, how can we change it? Well, first, like the ripple, it's got to start with you. Do you have the competencies required to build trust? Some of those could be the ability to form relationships. And I don't mean the shallow sit-on-the-surface-based relationships. Not the, hey, how you doing? kind of relationships but true connections to others. I had one boss who came into work every day. Every single day, he would walk into the office, hit the escalator, and go straight up the escalator to his office. In his mind, he had great relationships with people on his level, with government officials, with people in his industry who were CAOs. He had great relationships and intimate kind of deep down relationships with some of these people. But when he came down to his 300 or so staff, his relationships with people were extremely superficial. So, what does that look like for you? Do you have the capacity to inspire others? What does that ripple look like for you? That's the one thing with inspiration. When you inspire others, you end up building that trust and that ripple Spreads out so that when you create initiatives or when you have to instigate change, that ripple inspires other people to step up and head-on into the challenge with you? Are you comfortable leading change or do you fight change tooth and nail? As a test, look back to March of 2020. Was this a thriving moment for you or a surviving moment for you? Change is a constant. The pandemic showed us how fast change can happen. We see it in our industries time and time and time again. But the pandemic was like a light switch went on when it came to change. Do you have the humility to admit mistakes? and asks forgiveness. I know that there are a lot of bosses out there who are like, I'm the boss. I don't have to apologize. It's my business. And those are the businesses, I hate to say it, that will see the Great Resignation take effect. Are you vulnerable enough that you can tap into the knowledge and capacity of the people around you? Or is it a case of, Do as I say. Again, I've known bosses like I had one particular operator who I was talking to them about doing a SWOT analysis. And I was talking with the dishwasher and he pulled me aside and he says, why are you talking to dishwasher about my business? And I said, well, because the dishwasher will have intricate knowledge of how the flow in the kitchen is going, how his role can be helped or hindered? And he looked at me and goes, the only thing the dishwasher could tell me is when is payday and when can I go for a smoke break. And I thought, there's a limiting belief that when you want to trust that you have people in roles who have capacity, you can tap into those people. But you have to have the humility and the fortitude to be able to do so. Another trait is do you keep commitments? One true test. Do you keep commitments to yourself and to the ones closest to you? Typically, these are the ones that suffer first. I mean, everybody knows about the New Year's resolution. How long does that last you? When you turn around and say, I'm going to lose 20 pounds, and you decide by February you're going to drop the gym membership, you're letting yourself down. But that is a test of trustworthiness to yourself. And it unfortunately affects the people who are closest around you. We tend to let people who are closest to us down first. And I know I've been a huge victim or instigator of that in my life. Are you transparent in your dealings and open with your communication? A huge thing. Are you holding things close to your chest? I used to think that knowledge was power. And I thought I would, especially when I was younger, I used to, if I had all this magical information, it's like, boy, if I keep this information to myself, they're going to need me forever. But then, I realized as I matured that knowledge is power. But it's only powerful if you share it. Just like this podcast, I ask people, share the information with people that you know because the knowledge It can help so many people. But this idea of communication and this being of one, Gandhi said, one man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one divisible whole. And I've always kind of tied to that because we have the political correctness. We have the, this is what I'm going to do for us. And then, people behave differently back behind closed doors. I've had supervisors where, or managers where they've gone to their supervisors and say, you have to be supportive of the staff. And then, when they're in a management meeting with the doors closed, it's like, oh my God! I wish my supervisor wasn't such an idiot. And it's like, how does that play in trustworthiness? And what's even worse than that is I've heard managers tell supervisors talking about staff that way. And then, they get mad when the supervisors have contempt for the staff. I hate to say it. But if you're in the back room saying, oh my goodness! I wish Donna could be a stronger worker and I wish she could use good common sense. And the supervisor then leaves that meeting and sees Donna and then treats Donna like she's an idiot. This is what we mean by the ripple effect. Are you accountable for the power you wield? Now, I know you're probably thinking, Marc, what power? I don't have power. But remember the ripple. Everyone you touch. Opening the door for somebody and saying, hey, good morning. Seeing an employee who you know has a mother who is having a tough time. Hey Donna, how's your mother doing? And stopping and listening. Seeing someone who is visibly having a tough time and saying, how can I help? If you don't think you have the power, there's one test to figure it out. If you don't think you have the power to make a person's day different, ask yourself, can I make this person's day horrible and miserable? And if you say yes, then you also have the power to do the opposite. So, we have some core capacities leaders need to build. We have in what we've discussed so far communication skills, humility and vulnerability, transparency, the ability to inspire others, and the ability to tap into the genius that you surround yourself with. Being accountable and keeping commitments. Once you have yourself nailed down, only then can you start looking and building trust within your team, or your department, or your organization. You cannot influence change, I believe. I don't think you can influence change in your organization if you're not working on yourself first. And as I mentioned at the very beginning, this could mean that you start with yourself by repairing all those relationships. Anything, anybody that you've hurt along the way, people who have now had this level of distrust, it's up to you to start repairing those bridges. And it could be really, really a tough haul depending on how bad, how much you're withdrawn from this bank account. So, I'd like to talk a little bit about how you can maybe build up some trust in your organization. And we'll get to that. Right after this.

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Welcome back! I hope you are finding value in today's episode. You know, I came across some really interesting statistics as I was preparing for this episode. Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report 74% less stress. 106% more energy at work. 50% higher productivity. 13% fewer sick days. 76% more engagement. 29% more satisfaction with their lives. And 40% less Breakdowns. Sorry, just had a brain fart there. Stephen M. R. Covey's formula is right. So, in his book, he talks about when trust is high, speed goes up and costs go down. When trust is low, costs go up and speed goes down. He highlights it in his book when he talks about the transportation airlines. Airlines before 9/11, airlines was pretty easy to get on and off. It was cost-effective and it was quick to get through security and to get boarded and get going. After 9/11, so many restrictions had to come in. They had to hire so many more people at the screening areas. And they had to slow everything down as they checked on people. And we see that now even with the post-COVID or the COVID testing that we see in airlines. The idea here is we're not trusting that everybody is going to do the right thing and stay home if they're sick. So then, these random COVID testing scenarios are happening, which is slowing stuff down. So, we know that we have the proof that high trust environments do so much better than low trust environments. And it makes me shake my head when I see a low-trust environment. I think they haven't got this. Why haven't they got this? So now that we've worked on ourselves a little bit and become trustworthy, let's talk about how you can expand your ripple and some key strategies to build organizational trust. But how do you build trust? Well, first and foremost, Trust. You have to trust in order to build trust. If you want to build trust but you don't trust that people will trust, then you don't have trust that you can trust, if that makes sense. So first and foremost, so I have 7 areas I think that we can work on. One is recognize others. If you've read my book, if you've followed anything I've done, I'm a big fan of what gets recognized and rewarded gets repeated. I'm a big fan of recognizing people doing good things. If you recognize people doing good things, they'll keep doing good things. I believe that human behavior will escalate and evolve all the time. So, if you have somebody who's not getting recognized and other people are getting the same effect regardless of the quality of their work, then you start seeing that the performance will start dropping. If you leave people untethered in their bad behavior, if you don't call out and recognize bad behavior when it happens, it'll just keep on happening. So, I think it's essential that when you have somebody who does something good that you recognize and reward them. And the reward, we're not talking start handing out $50 bills. I'm talking about simply pulling, Donna, I just saw how you served that gentleman. Man, what a great job! I really love how kind you are with your customers. What do you think Donna's going to do the next time? Right. So, it's important that the recognition part of it, recognize excellence, recognize when people do things well. It's really important that you do it in a timely fashion and you make it— it's not, hey, good job, is not good enough. Make sure that it's really specific to the behavior that you want them to repeat. Number 2, celebrate and encourage failing forward. Now, I know some of you will look at this and go, but Marc, you know, it would cost lives if people failed forward. Well, this is why let's say airline pilots train in simulators before they ever have a passenger. This is why doctors are practicing on dummies because that is how they fail forward. When you have a new employee in your business, where are the areas that they can fail forward where they can learn and they can adjust and they can adapt? Because every time we fail, every single time we fail, we learn something. I had one event that happened at a hotel where the lounge got robbed. Somebody had sent in somebody to distract the the waitress, the bartender. And then, somebody crawled in behind the bar and stole money from the VLT, the video lottery terminal till. And people were— the owners were mad. The accountant was mad. And my only thought process was, how can we keep this from happening again? We just learned a very valuable lesson that we have a liability that we need to cover up. And the owners were like, well, aren't you going to fire the bartender? And it's like, well, no. The bartender was doing what she's paid to do. She was serving her customers. The fact that somebody manipulated her to pull her as far away from the bar as they possibly could while somebody crawled on their hands and knees behind the bar is not her fault. The fault belongs to us because we had a system that allowed that to happen. And we learned by failing forward. And so, my response to the owner was, hey, we just learned a $5,000 lesson. So, failing forward, we have to look at it and say, how can we encourage people to grow by taking the chance to fail forward? If we trust that people are doing stuff for our benefit and because of that, we're going to reap the reward of innovation and critical thinking and inventive thinking, Wow! That's powerful. So number 3, create challenge stress. I love this term because I tell people that as leaders, our job is to absorb the stress of our teams. And so then, when I say, hey, let's create some challenge stress, people look at me and go, but Marc, you said stress is bad. It's not all stress is bad. I love this term because this is where you can give your team challenging projects that are attainable and have definitive to have a definitive end. This is where you empower people. I went to one of my bartenders when we were designing a new food and beverage operation. And I said to the bartender, I said, I'd like you to go home and I'd like you to think of components you want designed into your bar. And he goes, really me? And I said, yeah, you work it every day. You know what your workflow looks like. So, I'd like you to come back tomorrow with some ideas of what you would like to see in the design of the bar. This is where you can showcase yourself to be the coach and mentor. You give your people a project, something, a challenge that you want them to help you overcome. And then, you act as that coach and mentor. And at the completion of the project, everyone celebrates. Everyone celebrates together. You know, we've heard of postmortems where you have an event, or you have a project or something. Then, you sit down and said, let's talk about everything that went well. But then, let's talk about everything that we could do better next time. What a huge learning opportunity. And what a great way to build trust in the team that everybody walks around thinking, I have a voice. Number 4. Now that we are almost post-pandemic, give people discretion as to how they work. If I told you that I needed to drive, I wanted you to drive to Denver and you had to get there by 2 PM on Tuesday, do I care How you get there? I mean, I could map out the whole trip for you. We could even map it out together. Sit down and go, okay Steve, we're going to get you to Denver. You're going to take this highway, this, this, this should only take you this long. This one should take you this long, and so on. And then, we agree what routes you're going to take and when you should take them. But then, that's when the excuses happen. I'm sorry. I'm late because there was construction here and there was a landslide there. Steve, why didn't you just take a detour? Because you told me to go this way. And there becomes the breakdown in trust. If we give people the definition of what we want them to accomplish as we did during COVID we saw that people stepped in and they did what they needed to do. Now, they might not be at the computer at 9 o'clock. But maybe they're at their computer At 7 PM. Maybe they're working within the confines of what is working for them. But they're going to deliver. We learned that when left to their own devices, people will deliver the goods. In fact, one of the big concerns during the lockdowns was on average, people worked 4 hours more per week because they were working at their own desks. But let them make their plan. And then, be there to help and coach and mentor by giving them the discretion to do the work. You give them the outcome. Get to Denver by 2 o'clock. And then, let them define how they're going to work that. Number 5, share information broadly across boundaries. Let's stop using fear to hoard information. Right now, only 40% of employees report that they are well informed about their company's goals, strategies, and tactics. 40%! That's less than half the people think that their organizations are open with them. Imagine what could happen if we open the idea, the tactics, and their strategies, and our mission. And we report back and we have like a report card of some sort. You know, I think it's humorous that when I watch Jon Taffer's Bar Rescue. And almost every episode, he'll have the big meeting with the staff and the owners. And he'll look at the staff and he'll say, so, how much in debt are you? And they say, oh Jon, we're $300,000 in debt. And he goes, how much time do you have left, do you think? Oh, if we have 6 months, we'll be lucky. And almost in every situation, almost every single situation, the staff Come back with, I didn't know it was that bad. Imagine for a second that the owners earlier on would let their staff know, guys, our sales are dropping. I got to tell you, our rent is X amount. Labor is X amount. You guys have to help me. Do you think that they're more willing to help an owner who's that transparent with them than somebody who turns around and says, no, just keep doing what you're doing, and stresses all by themselves? I can't imagine what that level of stress does on the dynamics between the owner and the employees. Let people know where you are and how you're suffering and how you're handicapped. And let the magic of community and diverse thinking help you through it. I just finished doing a workshop where I brought a— we did it virtually because they're in Manitoba. But I just did a workshop to design, help them design an event. And it is so magical when you do that. this kind of exercise where it's all brainstorming and you're getting people to fill out virtual Post-it notes. And you give them a small time frame and people are just throwing their ideas down and just posting them up and doing it so quickly. And you look at what you create when you give everybody a voice. And you see that when people are unencumbered, some of the ideas that they come out with. And it is just incredibly powerful. Magic. And so, I encourage you to go through that and use the diversity of the team that you have. As you can probably tell, I love this stuff. And my one ask of you is if you do know somebody who is planning a leadership retreat or a conference and think that this would make a great topic for a keynote or for a breakout session, could you please connect me? It would be my absolute pleasure to serve your organization and your industry and even your intact team. So, number 6. Develop your people. If you watch this episode, if you've known me now since March of 2020 when I started this podcast, I am a big fan of developing people. And it's unfortunately the training and development budget on our financials is one of the first things to disappear when we get hit with downsizing or with reduction in revenues. I think it's a shame. There are a ton of programs, especially in Canada. We have programs that will allow you to train your employees and the government will pay 75% of that training up to $10,000. Imagine that. You can pay. You can train somebody in Canada. You can have your employees trained with new skills and new capacities. And it would only cost you 25% of the total cost. So, it would only cost you $2,500 to put one of your employees through a $10,000 training course. If you want to know more about that, please do reach out to me. I'm more than happy to share the information. But the bottom line is when you invest in your people, they will invest in you. I mean, imagine for a second that you take the time and you find out that Sheila wants to get developed. She's a Assistant. She's doing admin work. But she really wants to become a bookkeeper. She really wants to get into accounting. And you say to Sheila, you know what? Each year for the next— each 6 months that you're here, you can sign up for one course on us. A course in post-secondary is about $400 or $500. So imagine that Sheila takes a course. She's building her capacity. It's costing you $500 of her. And you're not paying her to go take the course. You're just paying for the course. And then, she comes back with this new knowledge and new capacity. If you're a really great leader, you're sitting down with her and you're helping coach her through her professional development. How did that course go for you? What did you learn? What can you apply to your— what tasks can I give you to help you maximize that? And then 6 months later, she goes to another course and you repeat that process. You not only build trust, you build loyalty. And you're building capacity that you can tap into later. All for the low, low price. Number 7. Lastly, build community internally. This is so important that you have a group of people that you can bring together. You can help people intentionally build relationships within your community, cross departments and organizational-wide. You can do this. It is proven that when people build social ties at work, their performance improves. Imagine that somebody in accounting or accounts receivable, has contacts, and has face time with the sales reps who are making the sales. Imagine that you have people. This is one of the things, the challenges with the pandemic was one of the things that disappeared by people working by themselves at home was you didn't have what I call those constructive incidental collisions where people would meet at the coffee machine, or at the water cooler, or in the bathroom. So, find ways to build this community within your organization to help build that trust. As I wrap up, creating high-trust organizations is paramount to winning the war because we really do have a war on labor. As I've mentioned in the past episodes, I've had episodes where fulfilling your employee experience and expectations creates your reputation as an employer. Imagine for a second that you're not only engaging and retaining people, but the reputation that you garner is so strong that employees are saying to other people, oh, I don't know why you're working there. You should come work with us. Man, oh man, this is a great place to work. Trust solidifies job satisfaction and is proven to increase retention. And why wouldn't it? Gallup recently reported that if trust is high, 50% of employees are engaged. When trust is low, 13% of employees are engaged. Now, you look at the difference and you say, well, high trust, only 50% are engaged? Well, when the national average is 36% right now are the people who are moderately engaged. That is, they come in, they do basic work. And that the 12% people who are actively disengaged are the ones who are hurting your business. Having 50% of your employees engaged and doing everything for the benefit of your business, man, that's stellar. So when we are engaged, loving our jobs, why would you leave? I hope this makes sense for you. As you can tell, this is a passion point for me. I do believe that having this high trust, having the capacity to be able to build it is how we can build our businesses and how we can retain and really win the war on labor. I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have any questions about our topic today, or you'd like to brainstorm some aspect of your business with us, feel free to click the calendar link in the show notes and book a complimentary 30-minute session with me. I live to serve and it would be my absolute pleasure. And please, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share this episode with your network. The bottom line is applying what we learned today will be magic for your business. Even bigger if you apply these concepts to all your stakeholders. That is building trust among your employees, your suppliers, anyone you do business with. In any capacity, you will rock your world with the most amazing loyal brand ambassadors. Thank you so much for joining me today. It has been my absolute pleasure. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. Thanks for joining me today.