Edelman Trust Barometer – Trust at Work

trust

The Edelman’s 19th annual Edelman Trust Barometer study researched data from more than 33,000 respondents to analyse and identify the implications of this data for organisations regarding trust in the workplace.

Some important findings from this report include:

  • There was a slight increase in trust in general, especially within NGOs and businesses, however, distrust could still be seen in government and media entities with rising trends.
  • Overall most employees still feared to lose their jobs due to lack of training and skills required for a high-paid job, being replaced by machine or automation or international disputation in trade.
  • Most high-educated people believed that they were going to be better off in the next 5 years while only half of the mass population believed the same. Surprisingly, the majority of the mass population who were pessimistic about the future were from developed countries.
  • In general, most people claimed to trust their organisation with increasing trend compared to the previous year. Indonesia had the highest level of trust in employers, followed by China and India. Even more than half of the people who were pessimistic about the future said they trusted their companies.
  • A majority of surveyed respondents agreed that it was extremely important that their business leader take responsive actions during difficult times.
  • Not every employee considered their organisation as a reliable information source for social issues with more than 70% of them would trust their companies for global economy information while only 58% of them would trust technology information from their employers.
  • Societal impact, Values, Vision for the Future, Organisational Purpose and Operations were rated as the most important factors that could increase level of trust between employees and their organisation.
  • When deciding which employer to work for, employees generally have high expectation for shared action, personal empowerment and Job Opportunity, to the extent that some of them would never consider working for companies that couldn’t offer these.
  • Employers who have been meeting their employees’ expectations were more likely to have a higher level of trust.

Full report here.