Lesson 2: Trust is a Two-Way Street

The pandemic created a unique situation. Several nations felt a greater trust in their governments (New Zealand, Taiwan), while other citizens, such as in the U.S., the U.K., China, and India, felt trust in their governments fall to an all-time low.

Why the latter case?

Because of the miscommunication, suppression of information, and carelessness around the medical nuances of the pandemic—especially the insistence on herd immunity. More importantly, the government’s lack of trust in the populace’s ability to handle a difficult situation got mirrored back: the populace also developed a distrust of their government.

What can managers learn from this?

1. To earn the trust of their workforce, managers need to practice a high standard of employee care, updating their physical health, mental health, and safety.
2. From a counter-intuitive perspective, to earn the trust of your employees, you also need to put trust in your employees.
3. If you don’t trust them to work to the best of their ability and handle day-to-day processes, you stifle their creativity and create a situation where they can’t fully be themselves.

Questions that could improve mutual trust with employees:

1. What stands in the way of trust between management and employees?
2. What would we do differently if we trusted the vast majority of employees?
3. What personal behavior can we exhibit to help build even more trust?

Employees prefer a measure of freedom over their own workflows. When organizations give their employees this freedom, they show confidence. One way of this is through the use of the hybrid work mode—allowing family-invested employees more time at home.

Another way that organizations can improve the standard of trust in an office is to screen the visitors’ health and vaccination status so that everyone can trust each other. In this way, everyone knows the office’s health status. A visitor management system is capable of handling hybrid work schedules as well as deploying health screen questionnaires.

Lesson 3: Personalized Empathy

The last and most important piece of the management puzzle is care—personalized care for each individual involved.

If the workforce is suffering a bad situation, you would want to reach out to them at a personal level, to make sure they are okay.

A “one size fits all” approach that adheres too closely to a protocol won’t work because it can be dehumanizing in certain situations. For example, if a new mother needs a 3-day work-from-home situation or a freelancer needs 1 fixed day in the week to visit the office, then your approach should be different for both employees. You need to listen to their stories and show trust in their dedication and ability, giving them benefits accordingly. 

Questions that could show your care for the employees:

1. To what degree are employees adversely influenced by a particular situation?
2. What knowledge do they have that will be useful in this situation?
3. Have we made certain topics off-limits for employee engagement? If this is the case, what assumptions are enforcing the taboo?

If you work in management, remember that your role is to be your company’s conscience at all times. Take the initiative and challenge your own organization to act in accordance with empathetic values.

When employees want to discuss an unsavory situation, take the time to understand it from each of their perspectives. As the communication increases, you might develop protocols on how to delegate remote work, deploy emergency communication procedures, propagate business continuity, prevent the spread of infectious diseases, and adopt new technologies.

With a visitor management system, you show your workforce that you care, by creating a situation that uses technology of the moment to present a safer future! In an era of growing international distrust, we must work to strengthen mutual cooperation. We need to understand how to quickly incorporate evidence into technological policy, as well as how people react to such large, complex events.

If we can alleviate suffering in the future, it will not compensate for all of the loss and hardship we have experienced in the last two years. But at the very least, we can say that we did our best to learn from it, and let that be the only positive legacy of all of this.