Millennial business leaders understand more than their predecessors that building trust with employees is a cornerstone of business success. But realization is only half the battle—they still struggle to find the best ways to do it.
Global leadership community YPO recently conducted a member survey designed to provide the chief executive perspective on the importance of stakeholder trust, the extent to which they are taking action and succeeding at building cultures of trust within their organizations, and their views on the role of societal impact in building trust with stakeholders.
The org’s newly released Global Pulse Survey on Trustfound it is a key matter for business leaders around the world, but there are significant gaps between business leaders’ thoughts and actions.
Key findings include:
- 96 percent of chief executives rate building and maintaining trust with stakeholders as a high priority, with close to half (42 percent) saying that the importance of building trust with stakeholders has increased in the past five years.
- Only 40 percent of chief executives find it easy to build trust with employees, and they find it even more challenging to do so with their customers (36 percent).
- Even though most global business leaders agree this is high priority issue in which they feel increasing urgency around, over 60 percent have yet to measure employee trust within their business and only a third (34 percent) have defined specific plans within their business for building/maintaining employee trust.
- Most chief executives understand the weight of their role, with 89 percent agreeing that they as business leaders are under pressure to embody their organizations’ values through their actions.
- 77 percent of business leaders agree that they are under pressure to take the lead on change, rather than waiting on government to impose it.
- Most business leaders (71 percent) agree that their business can have a positive societal impact; fewer business leaders agree that taking action on societal issues improves employee (56 percent) or public trust (57 percent).
Download the full report here.
The 2020 Global Pulse Survey on Trust was conducted by YPO from 1-18 November 2019 via an online questionnaire. A total of 2,960 YPO members responded to the survey. The sample included members in 115 countries. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.84 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
