Trust Survey

Background

Trust is the basis for almost everything we as humans do and is one of the most essential forms of capital leaders and organisations possess.

What do we mean by ‘Trust’?

In our opinion, Trust is ‘the belief that someone can be relied on to do what they say they will and is a key element of social relationships and a foundation for both cooperation and collaboration’.

A study in the Harvard Business Review[1] found that where High-Trust exists there is 74% less stress, 100% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout than where there is Low Trust.

In our Research into ‘Collaboration and Working Collaboratively in the Construction/Built Environment Sector’ published in January 2023 (to read this click here) two thirds (67%) of respondents reported that ‘Trust is built through the creation of open and honest relationships’.

Where this does not happen and Trust is low people can easily become bogged down by office politics and infighting, with people being more likely to withhold information and hoard resources because they don’t feel safe sharing them.

More significantly, low Trust between organisations in projects, contracts and supply chains means that success is substantially less likely with higher levels of disagreements and disputes leading to costly outcomes

With the above in mind we decided to carry out a Snapshot Survey to look at the state of Trust across the Construction and Built Environment Sector.

Survey Approach

Over the last couple of years we have through our LeadersMeets/CICI Surveys and Research collected some data on Trust, but had not specifically looked at Trust. In this Survey our focus was solely upon Trust and in particular what people’s views of the state of Trust was in the Construction/Built Environment Sector.

Our approach was to use just  6 brief questions so as not to intrude on people’s time given that our recent Time Survey published in May 2024 (to read this click here) revealed that most people across the sector are ‘time poor’.

[1] https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust

The survey was undertaken in between May and early July 2024.

Given the importance of Trust in business it is unsurprising, as well as reassuring, that respondents rated this 9.3/10 with some 80% rating it 9 and 10/10.

Given that some 85% of respondents say that they trust between 50% and 70% or more of the people they work with in Question 2 above it would be hoped that this would indicate a high level of trust across the sector.

However, respondents when asked this question rated ‘trust between organisations’ as an average of 5.5/10 – a disappointing level of trust  between organisations. Respondents used the full range of scoring available, but were the 7% who rated ‘trust between organisations’ at 10 taking far too an optimistic view?

When asked the same question in our Snapshot Survey published in August 2022, a lower number responded with a 10 rating but fascinatingly the overall rating was 5.5/10 – trust between organisations in the sector has over this near two-year remained static but, nonetheless, is still disappointing and needs to improve.

When respondents were asked if they ‘implicitly’ or ‘explicitly’ trust people, just under a third (30%) ‘implicitly’ trust others with over two thirds (70%)only  ‘explicitly’ trusting others ‘when they have earned it’.

The interpretation here that one can infer from this response is that there is potentially a culture of low Trust, or one of ‘distrust’, that exists between people across the Construction Sector.

It is important to recognise that distrust does not just ‘happen’; it develops progressively through bad experiences, disagreements, disputes and poor relationships that hinder future collaboration within contracts, projects and supply chains.  Significantly, within this sector people regularly enter into new contracts and projects where some or all of these factors have impacted past work.