HRHeadStart #95: HR Priorities; Building Trust
The Talent Agenda
The last few years have been uniquely challenging for businesses due to the lingering economic uncertainty, technological change, geopolitical tensions and the aftermath of the pandemic. As the business landscape shifts, it’s worth assessing how HR is shifting and needs to shift.
A survey from BCG across over 100 countries provides some interesting results. When asked to rate a number of HR capabilities, respondents rated Health & Safety, Employee Relations and Policy Management as the strongest HR capabilities. These are all important, but they don’t necessarily create a differentiated talent advantage. Capabilities like talent management, organizational development & design, analytics, upskilling/reskilling, strategic workforce planning etc., which do create differentiation, are rated poorly.
All of this indicates a substantial opportunity for us to move the needle. Interestingly, Flexible Work Schemes jumped up significantly. This tells us that we need a strong stimulus to make change happen and make me wonder if HR is being reactive rather than proactive. Dive into the report here.
Working Better
People like to work with people who they know, like and trust. There are two types of trust:
Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability.This is trust from the head. Affective trust on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart.
Most of us understand cognitive trust. We build that through our credibility, competence and character. Affective trust often feels a little bit squishy because it’s hard to pin down, but the research shows that we actually need to focus on affective trust first.
Check out some simple tips to build trust and you can explore further here.
Tiny Thought
Building trusting relationships makes the rest of the work easy. Trust is the performance multiplier.