Cat DiStasio, Freelancer at ADP

(Originally published on ADP’s blog, “Spark”)

“Trust matters because it’s a huge contributor to employee motivation and employee engagement, and those in turn have a huge impact on organizational performance.” – Jordan Birnbaum, VP and Chief Behavioral Economist at ADP.

When employees trust their managers, they are usually happier, more engaged and perform their jobs more effectively. To better understand how building trust with employees improves the performance of teams and benefits the organization as a whole, we talked with Jordan Birnbaum, VP and Chief Behavioral Economist at ADP.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Birnbaum explores the importance of employee trust in today’s workplace.

Q: What exactly does employee trust mean?

Birnbaum: “Ultimately, how we define trust means relatively little. The way individual employees define trust is what matters because they are the ones whose trust we need to build.

Employees define trust in a lot of different ways. For employees, trust could mean believing that someone is speaking well of you or looking out for your best interests when you’re not around. It also involves having trust in someone’s judgment. You could have trust in someone doing the right thing. Employees want to have trust in how someone will create opportunities for them.

Essentially, employee trust is all about guessing what’s going to happen in the future and making predictions about a leader’s behavior.”

Read the full article on ADP.com.