Edelman’s Annual “Trust Barometer” report is out. Maddie broke the news on SocialFishing, pointing out that trust in CEOs dropped precipitously (50% last year; 38% this year), where trust in the “regular employee” was up by a similar margin (34% last year to 50% this year). That’s big news, and it’s consistent with what she and I have been writing about. Obviously trust is an important issue to us–Trustworthy is one of the four human elements we write about in Humanize.

There is a 32-page slide deck from Edelman that goes over the main points in their report. Here are some highlights from the Humanize angle:

16% trusted information from Corporate sources, and 14% trusted information from social media. That’s low, overall (traditional media was 32%), but notice how corporate and social media are just about the same. That’s huge. And social media was at 8% the year before–a big jump. This actually connects more to the “Open” element in the book. It’s about decentralization. Getting information from the top is not viewed as reliable. We are valuing the periphery more than the center. And with good reason. There’s tremendous power there.

When ranking the importance of certain business activities, the one that scored the highest in importance was “listening to customer needs and feedback” (67% said it was important), but when asked to score how business is doing in that area, only 36% gave business high marks (one of the biggest gaps on the list). Treating employees well also had a high importance score (64%) but low performance (27%). Interestingly, the item with one of the smallest gaps was innovation in products, services, and ideas. 46% said important and 41% said business is doing well.

The lesson with that one? We’re good at the stuff, but not good at taking care of people. We design cool products and ignore our customers and employees. And note that we think the treatment of customers and employees is actually MORE important than innovative products.

And that’s the biggest lesson here for me. We need to pay more attention inside, to the people, to the relationships, to the communication. We’re pretty good at products. We put a lot of attention on the stuff. But the stuff alone is not going to cut it. The Edelman study isn’t called a “barometer” for nothing. It’s signaling a change. The same change we’re signaling in Humanize. Building the better mousetrap used to be all you needed to do. If you also listened to customers and treated employees well, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t required. Or at least it wasn’t perceived to be.

I don’t think that’s true any more. The “stuff” part is a given. If you have bad products, you’re out of the game. If you don’t provide value to the customer, you won’t succeed. But that’s just your entry fee. Once you’re in, you have to pay attention to what’s going on “inside.” Your employees. Your customers. The way people are treated. Trust. I think those things are going to separate the high performers from the merely “relevant” in the coming years.

In the chapter on How to Be Trustworthy we talk about transparency, truth, and authenticity. But the chapter on Open is equally valuable for trust (particularly decentralization and ownership). So where does Edelman conclude on all of this? They have four recommendations:

We agree. Well, maybe not radical transparency necessarily. But these ideas hit what we’re talking about dead on. The first one is simply a rewrite of “Clarity over control.” The focus on “engagement behaviors” has social media and decentralization written all over it. Again, transparency (whether or not you think it’s radical) is key. And note that it’s the “public” discourse on issues that needs to be shaped. Not the internal messages that are broadcast out.

So if you’re nodding your head to all this, then let’s move to the next question: what are you doing about all this?

Image credit.

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Humanize: How People-centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World takes on the topic of trust in great detail.  Buy the book today.