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Forget employee and customer satisfaction

Picture credit: alicepopkorn

Picture credit: alicepopkorn

Most organizations of size conduct regular customer and employee satisfaction surveys. But they don’t ask the most fundamental question of all: do you trust our company?

This is a surprising omission because mutual trust throughout the value chain(s) should be the foundation of every enterprise.

So why don’t we routinely ask our colleagues and partners if we hold their trust?

I suspect that it is a taboo question,  the answers may be uncomfortable for some – so the question is never put. But a mature organization should not shy from asking awkward questions because that is where the greatest learning lies.

The first step in finding better solutions is to start asking better questions™

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  • http://www.governancedynamics.yolasite.com Judith Graham

    My first thought is…. do I trust my company to do WHAT? Look after me as an employee? Look after the customer? Make wise choices that will help secure the future of the company?

    I don’t think that asking this question is difficult as much for the ‘uncomfortableness’ of the responses, but because trust means so many different things to different people.

  • GMan

    I agree with the context of this article, but in reality it is irrelevant. Companies do not care if you trust them. Only if you will be coming back for more. And, we usually do. So, trust really has no meaning if we continue to patronize those that we do not trust. Who is at fault here; the company, the consumer?

  • http://dwelch.me.uk David Welch

    My experience has been that companies commission survey with the intention to use the results for a specific purpose (e.g. improving sales, convincing staff that they care etc.).

    With that in mind they choose the questions with the desired results in mind!

    For instance a company that has not increased employee pay across the board, for all staff, for many years, is not going to ask staff if they are happy with the company’s pay policy. Nor are they likely to ask employees what they think about the differences between the director’s pension provision and theirs.

  • http://www.quaysidecomms.co.uk Jonathan Russell

    My MBA dissertation research into corporate brands, reputation and trust highlighted that many communications experts pushed for higher corporate engagement in the concept of trust as an element of managing more proactively their corporate reputation. With that in mind organisations need to ask themselves what does “trust” mean in their circumstance. Or more usefully ask their staff, customers and as wide a stakeholder community as possible, what trust looks like in their eyes. Reputation and brand management at a corporate level is very much about management of a dialogue which sets out to create a dialectic conversation between perception (how the stakeholder sees the organisation) and image (how the organisation sees itself). The vision for the organisation that is properly focused on its reputation is to seek to merge these two definitions and sustain the position. In other words one should not be allowed to move too far from the other. This should be at the root of any risk management agenda.
    Trust is only important to an organisation that is concerned with its broad sustainability. Trust will always be a factor for stakeholders, albeit ranked in a more fluid way. A hightly commoditised business will not engender trust as a key factor until the point it becomes untrusted or untrustworthy. Ipso facto, the organisation cannot afford to not worry about how trusted it is if it plans to be more than transitory in the marketplace.