216 How Organizations Can Earn Lifelong Loyalty Through the Four Factors of Trust with Deloitte’s Ashley Reichheld and Amelia Dunlop | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm really excited this week to be welcoming Ashley Reichheld and Amelia Dunlop. Ashley is a principal at Deloitte Digital, and Amelia is the Chief Experience Officer for Deloitte Digital. Together, they have co-written the Four Factors of Trust: How Organizations Can Earn Lifelong Loyalty.

I really enjoyed this conversation because trusted companies outperform their peers by up to 400%, and customers who trust the brand are 88% more likely to buy again, and 79% of employees who trust their employer are more motivated to work and less likely to leave. So it is critical for us to lead for greater trust.

I'm sure you will enjoy the conversation and learn a lot from Ashley and Amelia as I did. I also love hearing from you. Keep your comments coming. mahan@mahantavakoli.com. There is also a microphone icon on partneringleadership.com. Really enjoy getting those voice messages. Don't forget to follow the podcast Tuesday conversations with Magnificent Change Makers from the Greater Washington DC, DMV region, and Thursday Conversations with brilliant global thought leaders. 

Now here is my conversation with Ashley Reichheld and Amelia Dunlop. 

Ashley Reichheld, and Amelia Dunlop, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

Amelia Dunlop: 

Thanks for having us.

Ashley Reichheld: 

We're thrilled to be.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Really excited. I love the Four Factors of Trust: How Organizations Can Earn Lifelong Loyalty. and a big advocate for that trust. But before we get to it, I would love to know a little bit about each one of you, Amelia. Where did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact the person you've become?

Amelia Dunlop: 

Thanks for having me. I was born in England and my family and I moved to the United States when I was five years old and academically my background is in sociology, theology, and business. So, sometimes like to say Mahan, that I'm one of the very few strategy theologians out there. 

But I do think it's important to share that because I think it has influenced some of these topics that we're gonna talk about today and why focusing on the human experience and why trust is such an important part of that. So, that's been a part of my journey as well. 

Mahan Tavakoli: 

It is an interesting background and I wonder how has the theology piece of it contributed to your role in consulting?

Amelia Dunlop: 

That's a different question. I think, my reflection on that would be that it's definitely impacted who I am, right? And how I show up, and I think the questions that I've always grappled with most are ones of bigger meaning and bigger purpose. And so, the topic that we’re gonna talk about now, what's more important than whether or not you're trusted, whether or not your organization trusts you, your team trusts you, your customers trust you.

So, I think I'm drawn to those big ultimate life types of questions. And I once had a colleague say to me, Congratulations on aligning your purpose, your passion, and your profession. So I'm very lucky to be able to do that.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

That is really fortunate. And one of the things Amelia, I hear from podcast listeners is they love hearing a little bit about the background of the authors in part because it's that authenticity and that background that helps them trust the content that this person is sharing. So, I appreciate that with you. 

How about yourself, Ashley? Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impacted you?

Ashley Reichheld: 

I love that notion, by the way, Mahan. We're all human first, so understanding who we are as human beings is really important to understanding what it is we're talking about. So I love that you're asking these questions. My upbringing was really different, I grew up in Ohio on a little Christmas tree farm.

I come from a family of teachers and they thought that one of the things that was really important for us to learn was both hard work, which we had a lot of, but also how to run a business. How to create customer interactions? How to think about the finances behind it? All the things that go into what business owners need to do.

So, I remember my dad actually having me run my own farm when I was 16. And we did a lot of it on the basis of trust and loyalty. So, I would tag trees and then people would come, whether or not I was there and drop money off for all the trees. I actually don't think I had a single tree stolen the whole time.

So, in that regard, I was either very lucky or was in a very high trust area. Since, has spent most of my career abroad. Mostly in Holland, but all around the world working for different companies across every continent except for Antarctica, and came back to the States about eight years ago. Currently live outside of Boston with my partner and two kids.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Wonderful because that international experience, Ashley, brings a different perspective also to trust. I spent many years of my career traveling around the world and the way people relate to each other and the amount of trust they're willing to grant to each other can also be cultural. I know, in the book, you talk about some of the demographics and that impact. 

But before we get to that, we're throwing around this word trust and would love to hear from you, what does trust mean? So. when you want to write about trust and it;s importance and how it serves as its path to loyalty. What is that trust?

Amelia Dunlop: 

What do you think, Ashley? Why did Ashley and I even think about writing a book about trust? I would say that the journey for us as a partnership came together about four or five years ago. We were both part of a leadership team and together we set this aspiration to elevate the human experience.

And so, we weren't totally sure what that meant, but we knew that there was something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our customers, our workforce. Like we don't wake up as a customer, nobody wakes up as an employee. So we had this hunch that if we were to focus on the humanity in business, if we were to focus on not just pushing out product or tech or data, but just the human behavior at the end of it, we would be onto something. 

So then you play the tape forward and obviously you can't elevate anything if people don't trust you. So this is where Ashley has really dug into that research on what exactly it is that builds trust. 

Ashley Reichheld: 

There are lots of different definitions of trust out there, and we tend to use the ones that are around. Trust is what's built in moments of vulnerability and it's when you're able to make and keep good promises. The challenge with trust though, is that it's a really big concept, and as human beings, our lives are really messy and complicated, and it can mean different things at different times.

We love to run an exercise with people. We ask them to write down the definition of trust, and if you have 10 people, inevitably you get 10 different definitions of trust. Somebody will tell you, it's when you show up on time, Somebody else will say, It's when you make a good promise. Another person might have turned in a blank page that says, Oh, I know it when I see it, but I'm not really sure what to write down. 

And then we will also then give them more paper and say, Okay, we'll now write down the definition of reliability. And 10 outta 10 times you get back pretty similar definitions. The moral of this whole story being, trust itself is really hard for people to find, but they're really good at talking about what drives or erodes their trust or the factors of trust like we like to call them.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

So, when you look at that trust, what drives trust based on the research that you did?

Ashley Reichheld: 

We started doing this research a couple of years ago, and I would emphasize that this is not new. Trust has been studied forever. So, there was 40 plus years of research that went into our thinking when we started looking at what drives trust and when we ran our first studies, we used the research that others had done and then tested which factors were the most driving of trust.

In our research, we found that humanity and transparency, or a brand or organization's intents and capability and reliability or their competence is what drives trust. So, those are what we call the four factors, humanity and transparency and capability and reliability. And what was cool about that is not only did they scribe the vast majority of variation we saw in people's stated trust scores, but they also drive behavior.

When you're highly trusted, you earn all the things that you want as a company. You earn people's loyalty, people's purchase, people's advocacy. So, the four factors drive behavior.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

So, before we dig in on those four factors, Amelia, I would love to find out some of your thoughts and perspectives because we talked a lot about trust. And I think, if you Google it and read articles, there isn't a data that goes by that, whether Harvard Business Review or another, a publication has something about leadership trust.

At the same time, on the flip side, the sale of employee trackers has gone through the roof. Monitoring people's browsing history, activity, monitoring, remote access, so on and so forth. So, a lot of times people say there is a disconnect from what we hear from our leadership than the actions in the organization.

Why do you think there is that disconnect?

Amelia Dunlop: 

Oh my goodness. Really good question and you have totally put your finger on a topic that Ashley and I are both very passionate about. And you're right, you can't open the paper without both reading about the topic of trust and about this kinda exploding network of productivity trackers.

Our perspective is there's plenty of ways to measure trust in the rear view mirror. Many ways in which benchmarks are out there, but until now there hasn't been anything that lets a leader, like your listeners and ourselves, actually proactively do something about measuring that trust and building that trust.

Ashley and I like to talk about the fact that we believe that you have to give trust to get trust. So, those leaders, they’re putting in place those productivity trackers, they may be eroding trust unintentionally. Instead, if they could flip that, extending trust to their employees and measuring it, so that they can proactively build it, we think that is an important approach going forward.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

So would love to dig into that a little bit more Amelia. On Tuesdays, my conversations are with CEOs in the Greater Washington DC region, and at least half a dozen of them have mentioned their trust had been betrayed by someone. So they told me, whether they called it the Reagan rule or what avails, trust what verifies. 

You also mentioned granting of that trust. Where is the balance between granting of trust and then trust but verify?

Ashley Reichheld: 

I think you actually said it, which is in all of the research we uncovered, you have to give trust to get trust. And so, if you are beginning from a point of mistrust, you're actually trying to work yourself out of a hole. So it's really important, particularly as an organization, managing workers to be the one to extend trust and indicate that trust is there until it's not there, or until there's a reason to pull it away. 

This is why when we think about things like worker productivity. Our policy, or what we tell companies is you're measuring the wrong thing, you're measuring an outcome. But what you should be measuring is the driver of that productivity.

We know, for example, that when workers trust their employer, 80% almost are motivated to work versus just 30% who don't trust. So, there's a massive gap in terms of what trust drives. And so, rather than think about measuring the outcomes, think about measuring the drivers. Think about what's going to promote the positive things that you wanna see versus measuring the negative outcome of it. 

Because very likely if you were to do that research, you'll find out that the people you're tracking, mouse movement for, don't really trust you and don't understand why you're doing that anyway.

Amelia Dunlop:

 Yeah. And I think on the more personal leader side, you mentioned leaders talking to you about what. Is lost. One of the things that we found is most people don't wanna have a conversation about trust until after trust is broken. It's not the topic of conversation until you've had a trust event, and it can be a product recall, it can be an issue with your employee population. 

But it also can equally be an issue between two leaders, or in organizations. And I think, we've all had those experiences and while we set out to create this measurement system to help organizations and brands, we've also personally both used the four factors of trust in our own relationship with each other, but also with our teams as part of our leadership philosophies.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

And in order for us to be able to do that. I think one of the things that I also typically recommend to leaders is that we can't rely just on outlier past experiences to determine how we behave in the future. And a lot of times, in these instances, people use one time when their trust was portrayed three years ago, and that's why they can't trust anyone else ever again.

So, you mentioned those four factors, and I would love to understand a little bit more about each one of 'em. Humanity, capability, transparency, and reliability. What is that humanity that you talk about, Amelia?

Amelia Dunlop: 

Humanity is being fair, being equitable, and being kind. These all make up your perspective both for your customer and also for your employee. And that's one of the things that we thought was really important is that these factors actually don't vary by industry, they don't vary by population. 

But humanity is the most likely predictor of what Ashley is talking about whether or not you're likely to stay, whether you're likely to recommend your employer, whether you're likely to recommend the brand. So, humanity is one of those kinda very important parts of it demonstrating your intent.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

So how can leaders show more of that humanity?

Amelia Dunlop: 

So, let's take a situation where they're trying to demonstrate that humanity with their workers. It can be about demonstrating that they care. It can be about demonstrating their policies and around equity and inclusion. It can be about their hours. It can be about productivity trackers. And being really clear why they are or not investing in that type of tracking. 

And so I think, there's many different ways in which leaders can demonstrate that. And often it does start from the very top. We think about the stories of CEOs who we admire who are able to demonstrate authenticity and demonstrate their humanity as opposed to the CEO who rules from the company corner seaslip.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

What I find is that a lot of times some of the examples that are popularized in the media are those breakthrough entrepreneurs that have gotten great things done, but maybe they haven't shown humanity in dealing with their people. But they're the rare exceptions rather than the people that are actually most effective in organizations.

So, that humanity is really important, and I'm glad you mentioned it first and have it first, because without that, it's really hard to establish that trusting environment.

Amelia Dunlop: 

It's true. But there's one thing that's worth pointing out, and Ashley, I'm sure you're thinking this, is we had a hypothesis that humanity was gonna be super important in driving the outcomes. But what we learned in the research was that capability and reliability are the table stakes.

We often like to talk about the fact that you and I wouldn't go to a restaurant that we didn't believe was gonna serve us healthy, good food in a safe, clean environment. But if we do, and we happen to like the food, the fact that the server is gonna remember you or my name is gonna remember that it's our birthday, those touches around humanity is what will keep us going back.

So, we do think that they may not get us in the door to begin with, but they will actually keep us returning.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Great point and thank you for bringing that up even if you think about going to a doctor or a surgeon or whoever else, you want that capability and reliability to be there. Humanity is really important, without those other two, it's not just enough to have humanity.

Ashley, how about transparency because that’s another one of those critical factors of the four factors of trust?

Ashley Reichheld: 

It's actually one of the ones that most companies get wrong. So, when we take a look who's performing well, transparency is the secret sauce for our top trusted companies. It's one of the things they do better than everybody else. I think transparency and vulnerability are hand in hand.

If you think about an individual, you build trusted moments of vulnerability. So, I'm doing something that makes me vulnerable to you. Sharing something, putting myself out there. That's true for companies too, but the way companies share vulnerability is really by sharing information. So, giving you all the things that you need to know in order to make your decision.

That could be pricing detail. For example, some of the most trusted hotel companies share resort fees and hidden fees, so to speak in advance so you know what your total cost is gonna be, it's not a surprise when you get there. And that generates a huge amount of trust because I know that you're not only caring about me as an individual, but you're telling me what I need to know to make a really good choice.

And that company is trusting me with that information to make a judicious choice, which is equally important. So, transparency gets you trust too, because you're demonstrating trust.

Amelia Dunlop: 

Right. How Ashley example transparency and humanity go together. So, clearly communicating that you care or that you have the customer's best interest is a way that we think about the two coming together.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

That's an important point and I appreciate that you bringing it up because, initially, I was focusing primarily on using trust sort of in the leadership of an organization.  But part of what you mentioned in the book, and you also highlighted here, is that trust is a part of the relationship that the organization has with its consumer.

So, it plays a critical role with respect to that brand.

Ashley Reichheld: 

Yes. And that's true both on the worker and the customer side. As an employee, to have information in order to do your job effectively, you also need to have information to make choices. 

So, if you are feeling like you don't understand why your leadership is doing what they're doing, if you don't have the information that's telling you why they made that choice, you might be less motivated to go and act that choice because you just don't understand what it is you're trying to do and that misunderstanding generates mistrust too. 

So, it's equally important on the customer and workforce scale. And similarly, it's what most employer organizations also get rugged. They tend to be lower on transparency than the other attributes.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

You also developed a trust index. Would love to understand that a little bit better. For years, I've been an advocate of the net promoter score, partly because of the simplicity of it. And you go through some of the benefits of net promoter score and compare. 

How does the trust index compare and where is the value of the trust index for teams and organizations reflecting on the trust index rather than using net promoter score whether internally employer promoter score or externally?

Ashley Reichheld:

 Well, we would say that trust is the path to loyalty. Trust is an incredible competitive advantage that companies and organizations wanna take advantage of. And the goal in that is to earn loyalty. Earn loyalty from your workers to keep showing up, to be motivated to work, to go above and beyond. Loyalty from your customers to buy your product or to pay more for that product.

This is probably not super well known, but my uncle created the net promoter score. And so, when Amelia and I started doing our research, it was really important to us to use trust as a way to help understand net promoter score even better. NPS or the net promoter system is used by two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies.

So, it's a very well established and very easy to use metric, and we knew that in order to make this successful, we had to better explain why people were loyal or not loyal. So, we correlated the two, and actually, as it turns out, not surprisingly, we, you build trust, you earn loyalty. When you lose trust, you lose loyalty.

But what we got really excited about is that the trust measurement that we built adds a dimension to NPS that wasn't as articulated prior. So, you'll notice that capability and reliability are more heavily correlated with NPS than humanity and transparency are. Trust adds that lens, and it's a really important lens because those two elements really drive behavior.

So for example, when a company has a high degree of humanity, a customer is 280% more likely to stick with that company when they make a mistake. So, it allows you to get that resiliency as an organization because you've demonstrated your humanity.

Amelia Dunlop: 

And the way we like to think about it is, some many organizations, as we said, have a net promoter score in place, but sometimes it's hard to know what to do with that score. And so, for example, if we take an airline where two passengers might have the exact same net promoter score, but one of them has a much lower humanity score and the other one has a much lower reliability score.

And with that variation, we can actually target the actions to help build their trust. So, for the person who's low in humanity, you might just wanna sit them next to their kid. You might wanna kind send them something to let them know that you care about them as a customer and you value them.

For the other one who's low in reliability, they might have just sat in the tarmac for three hours. While you still need to treat them like a human too, you need to do more to be transparent about what's caused that breakdown. And so, that you'll be more reliable for our next.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

When you use it well, it gives you a lot more clarity with respect to what you need to address. But I want to dig in and understand how it can be used well. Because even on the net promoter score, I've seen organizations mistakenly twist themselves into pretzels and connect people's incentives to net promoter scores and do all kinds of things that cause the score to be totally skewed.

So, how can this trust index be approached well so it can be used as a way of increasing that trust and addressing issues rather than it becoming either a stick or something that is used for year end bonuses?

Ashley Reichheld: 

Someone we have real life experience with that. I bought a car not too long ago. And when I left the dealership, the representative said, Hey, I have this survey I really need you to fill out but I've gotta send my kid to school and it's really important that you give me all 10s.

So if you can't gimme all 10s, maybe just don't fill it out.

Amelia Dunlop: 

Right? Right. Like, what do you think that did for her trust?

Ashley Reichheld: 

I very much wanna help this person as an individual, but I can tell you my sales experience was also horrible so, there was no good way to do this and feel really productive about it. 

You're right, when you set up scores to be directly correlated with compensation, you're gonna get people gaming the system, and you really wanna avoid that, because the goal of these scores is not to use them punitively, it's as ameliar described to make sure we understand what people need from us in order to build and earn their trust. 

So, we want to understand it so that we can activate it. It shouldn't be a stick so much as it should be a lens that we use to better understand our human beings, customers and workers.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Talk about something that can gain trust or erode trust if you use the system. With trust, it can lead to conversations to help improve the system. If you use it without trust, it becomes something that, as you mentioned, like the net promoter score at the dealership every time, 

Same here, when I go to a car dealership for service, they call and they mark ten, ten ten, please give us a 10. 

Ashley Reichheld: 

And it's exhausting, right? How many times do you wanna fill out that survey? We get surveyed everywhere we go. So, it is fatiguing as a customer to be asked every time. Okay. Do you trust me? Do you like me? Did you like your experience? 

One of the things Amelia and I talk about a lot is, it's really important for organizations to move away from the rear view mirror of how did that experience go towards actually watching and observing what their human beings are doing so they can predict their scores based on behavior. 

That was one of the really exciting things about this platform, because trust is so behavioral. We've actually looked at and built algorithms to understand based on how you're behaving, I can tell what you trust or don't trust and that lets me intervene to change that trust score and I can do AB testing to market. 

So, I can look at Ashley and intervene with Ashley and compare that to Amelia, who's just Ashley, but I didn't do anything for Amelia and see if it was effective or not. It helps organizations make better choices about what campaigns to promote and how to scale those campaigns.

We encourage people to do that forward looking because it will help to avoid a lot of that survey fatigue and some of the gaming in the system that you see.

Amelia Dunlop: 

One of the things that Ashley and I were just talking about this morning too was the fact that trust is not the destination. We're passionate about it, We're gonna talk all day about it. But, as an executive and as a leader, to think about where's you trying to get to? You're trying to grow a certain customer audience all day. You're trying to improve your employee retention. If that's the problem you're trying to solve, how can trust help you on the path to get there?

Mahan Tavakoli: 

That’s an outstanding way to reflect about it. You also have. Some great questions that are used in the trust index in the book that teams of all sizes can reflect on as they look at where they would rate on that trust index. 

Now, I wonder, you took down some orthodoxies. One of them that I found most surprising is well-known brands, you say, are not the most trusted brands. Now, I wouldn’t say they are because we trust a name or a face or something that we repeatedly see and become familiar with. But you found that is not true.

Amelia Dunlop: 

We had that research hypothesis. But it's just not the case that we might be familiar with the brand or we might recognize the brand, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have our trust or our loyalty.

Ashley Reichheld: 

That's well said. People tend to act with their feet, so they will buy a brand they trust over and over. So, our hypothesis was the more known a brand is, the more likely they're getting those purchases, and that's just not true. An iconic brand doesn't actually equate to trust, and there are a whole lot of reasons for this.

One of the examples we'd love to give was cable companies 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you could have cable or not. There was no choose which provider. And as a result, I don't think cable companies took very good care of their customers. I remember waiting for hours on end for a tech to show up to fix my cable or internet, and maybe they'd come, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they'd hit the window, Maybe they wouldn't. 

Fast forward, with the introduction of lots of different subscription options and a lot of ways to get to these shows and the internet, all of a sudden there's dramatically better experience. Now, if that tech doesn't show up, they pay me for my time for when they're late.

So similarly, we see this in iconic brands, Trust is really earned and even if you have great marketing campaigns and great awareness, that doesn't mean that what you say and what you do are the same thing. And our customers are savvy. They're watching. What you say has to match what you offer and do. And when you don’t do that, then you’re road trash.

Amelia Dunlop: 

Fast forward from the cable companies. Now, a lot of high tech companies have our business but we might not necessarily always trust what they might be doing with all of our information.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

That's actually a great example because you're right, they are very well known brands in many instances that are not trusted at all. So, the recognition of it doesn’t go along with the same as trusting them. Would love to hear your thoughts on what would be examples of leaders and or organizations that are handling trust well.

Ashley Reichheld: 

One of my favorite stories is what Delta did during the pandemic. They were really careful to try to balance a bunch of different competing needs. They wanted to take care of their customers, They wanted to take care of their workers, and they wanted to make sure that there was a company to come back to.

Because overnight, I dunno the actual number, but I believe the traffic dropped by 80%. So, it was so many flights a day and then nobody flying all of a sudden. And their CEO at Boston sat down with an interview for us and was telling us about the different choices that he had to balance as a leader. And he did a couple of things just exceptionally well.

First of all, he was very transparent about the issues that they faced, the choices that they had in front of 'em. What Delta was trying to do and achieve with these three different priority stakeholder groups. And he gave agency to employees. Delta didn't actually have any mandatory furloughs at all. The furloughs that Delta had were all optional. So, he gave the choice to his employees to say, If you don't want to travel, now is the time, raise your hand and we will give you a furlough with health insurance so that you can feel safe and protected instead of having to get on a plane that might make you uncomfortable.

Amelia Dunlop: 

And I think, one of the things that we learned with the trust archetypes, Is the most trusted what we call the trust winners are trusted across all four of the factors of trust. So, one of the things that was interesting to us too is you can't be considered to be transparent and high in humanity, but not reliable capable, that there is a, that they do travel together as, , an example that Ashley just gave with Delta.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

I love that example for a lot of different reasons, including the fact that it is not a small team that has been able to pull this off. Delta is a very large organization, so it can be done at all levels. Sometimes the examples are of very small teams and organizations that might have unique experiences.

Now, one of the other elements of trust we'd love to get some of your thoughts about is whether it is organizations and a lot of CEOs right now are struggling with the return to work and the hybrid work. A lot of their team members are struggling with that. And trust plays a role with respect to that organizational culture of the future.

We'd love to get both of your thoughts on how that trust can be approached in a hybrid environment and hybrid future of work?

Amelia Dunlop: 

You're right, it's very timely. All of us as leaders are trying to figure out what does it means to even just to keep doing this for. To keep interacting, in sometimes physical real person, real life. And then sometimes on the hybrid version.

The good news is when we look at the four factors of trust, they don't vary. So, in terms of being able to build trust with your worker, you can apply that. But, I think what we've identified is that workers absolutely want to know that they are getting trust from their employers, which obviously means not making them fill in like extra time sheets, fill in extra busy work and do things that are taking away from their day. And we definitely observe that now that we don't have to do all the commuting, that we wanna make sure that we are using our time better. 

Ashley Reichheld: 

And I also think there's an increased focus on humanity and human interactions. There's a great debate right now about the return to office and is this something that we need in order to keep people productive and innovative. There are gonna be a spectrum of reactions to that. But, I think what we have seen regardless is that the connection with people is something that we continue to have to foster.

And whether that's in office or online, that element of I care about you, how you are doing what you need at work is incredibly important. And it's one of the things that we've believed will spike as people learn to navigate this hybrid future. Certainly we've seen that in our own culture and our leadership talks a lot about how do we create shared experiences for our colleagues, particularly if we're not gonna be on a client's side.

Amelia Dunlop: 

I think about the fact that if we're spending less time in the office or less time, where you have that opportunity to have that one-on-one conversation with your boss. By definition, every interaction now matters more. And so, if it's gonna matter more, what are we gonna do to convey trust and to grow that relationship with the individual.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

One of the things I wonder and would love to get your thoughts on is that lots of different surveys show that when given the flexibility, more women than men would wanna take advantage of the opportunity to work remotely. More people of color would want to take advantage of the opportunity to work remotely.

So, if you've got the choice to come in three days a week and take two days to work remotely, you will end up with more women and people of color working remotely those two days and others choosing to go in. 

And on the flip side of it, we tend to, as humans, connect and build more trust with people where we occupy space and interact with. So, how can leaders tackle that challenge?

Amelia Dunlop: 

One of the things that we observed. Again, we had a hypothesis that things like race and gender would be predictors of trust. And we found that's just not the case. It's not these markers, is a lot more to do with the lived experience that we each have and the expectations and agency we have.

So as women, Ashley and I talk a lot about the fact that women start out as trusting as much as men in the workplace but what's fascinating is that declines pretty steadily over time unless or until they get to the C-suite, which that's you know, a real challenge.

And so, realizing that given that women have trust challenges at different racial identities and trust challenges, I take your point about what does that then mean in the hybrid work environment, and are they gonna be willing to trust their employer and come back to work.

Ashley Reichheld: 

And to add a stat to that, to bring it to life, trust goes way down with women when you introduce measures like performance based compensation. Women will trust 500% less than men when that's the case. Now, when you reflect on that, you're thinking about a system that perhaps hasn't been designed for women and hasn't always worked for women. So, why should women trust a system that hasn't actually worked for them in the past? 

It's one of the things that people are gonna have to keep in mind. While our research didn't say that demographics were big drivers of trust, they are correlated. And it's because lived experience and demographics are correlated. As a woman, I can tell you, growing from Ohio, my experience wasn't the same perhaps as my brothers or as my male colleagues and that's important because it shapes how I interact with the world and it shapes my willingness to trust or not trust. 

We call those trust flags and we encourage organizations to be on the lookout for them because underneath the surface, those things are always boiling, and in moments of disenfranchisement they really pop up.

So, in an environment where men are coming to work more than women, we have to be very careful that we actually are creating an equitable workplace and performance reviews to manage for the things that we might not see if we weren't following those trust flags.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

And that awareness of it is important in and of itself in trying to tackle it. Now, Ashley and Amelia, we've got the listeners to the podcast in around a hundred countries and I wonder, I know you have international experience too, how does trust differ across cultures?

Ashley Reichheld: 

Gosh, it's one of the topics we're dying to research. So, most of our research was US based. We have a number of our partner companies, countries who are looking at trust in new cultures right now and we can't wait to get the data back. Because our expectation is that trust is human and so the four factors are very likely to stay on. We make good promises and keep them. But we do expect to see cultural differences in what drives those factors. 

For example, I spent a bunch of time in Sydney, Australia living. Wonderful place. Highly recommended. If you can go, go. And I remember being really surprised walking into a restroom one day and seeing a sign that says, Big X of a person standing on a toilet. Don't stand on the toilet. 

I'm sitting there going, Do Australians need instructions? There's a manual we can create for if needed. But, really what was driving that funny sign was that the number one tourist to Australia is from China. And in China, it is not sanitary to share a toilet seat. That's really disgusting.

So, what was happening was a lot of people were standing on toilet seats and breaking them . So, there's this cultural clash of different norms that mean different things to different people and I'm sure we're gonna see that play out in trust. 

Transparency is a really good example. Spent a bunch of time in Holland and people think Dutch are perhaps a little bit rude because the Dutch culture is to tell you exactly what they're thinking when they're thinking about it. That's just normal. You can expect to hear my opinion. In another culture like Japan, that would be considered terribly rude. It's rude to disagree in a meeting that's not done. You will cough. You'll do something else to indicate that you're not fully on board and then you go talk about it in private.

So, we are so excited to do that research cuz we expect to unravel a bunch of different cultural mysteries around trust.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

I am excited to find that out too because as you mentioned, there are those cultural differences. But trust plays an important role in all kinds of relationships, all across cultures. It has played a critical role in humanity from the very beginning on out. 

Now, early on Amelia and Ashley, you both mentioned the fact that talking about trust, researching trust also connects with your purpose. So, five years from now, we will have a conversation. Hopefully, we will have a conversation before that international research. But we have a conversation and the trust index and your thoughts on trust have gotten traction and made a difference. What will that difference be?

Ashley Reichheld: 

We're smiling because I think we're so passionate about this topic together, the two of us. We think that building trust will create the kinds of organizations we wanna be a part of and the kind of world that we wanna live in. So, if we fast forward and we have convinced the world that you need to measure and act to build trust, then we're pretty confident it's gonna be a place where we're all a little bit happier and a little bit more excited to be a part of.

Amelia Dunlop: 

And I would argue that if we are able to do that, that many organizations would be focused on things that really matter, which is, what is the experience you're delivering for your workforce and for your customer. And it's not just that we would see the information of new positions around customer and workforce experience, but they would have the tools to actually make a difference every day.

Ashley Reichheld: 

And this is relatively new, if you think about it. The focus on purpose. It wasn't so long ago that there was a memorandum of people that got together to say, , hey, we have more stakeholders than just our investors. So, it's not that it's a new concept that we should care about our customers and our workers, but I think the fact that boards and CEOs and leaders now have multiple audiences to consider beyond just shareholder value is what's allowing this new focus on the other things that matter.

ESG and environment is a really good example of that. How can you trust a company that doesn't take care of their people or the world in which we live? As investors, we're increasingly seeing people wanna spend money with companies that do have ESG programs in place that are making sustainable and green choices.

So, I think that move, that drive towards purpose is actually gonna be a catalyst for organizations needing and wanting to focus on trust as well.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

I truly believe that this trust that you talk about will help as a transition of the industrial age practices and approaches that we have in a lot of organizations to one much better suited to knowledge workers. One of the frustrations is now it's called quiet quitting, but in essence it's the same lack of employee engagement, which was called employee engagement 10 years ago where you look at it, only about a third of people are fully engaged at work.

So this trust can bring out the best out of humanity and the contributions of each individual. Rather than continually approach things the way we did before through that industrial age mindset and wonder why are people not engaged? Why don't they like what they're doing? Why do they try to minimize their contributions at work?

Amelia Dunlop: 

I think about the fact that you talk about the industrial age and trust was the social contract of the tribe. We used to all be members of tribes and we implicitly trusted our tribe. And now what we're trying to do is extend that trust, extend that social contract so that we can be more human with each other at a larger scale.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

It's gonna benefit us on all levels. One of the things that you mentioned pretty early on in the book is the fact that our trust in all types of institutions has gone down. 

So, there is a lot of room for improvement, not just in our organizations. But I know I've got a lot of listeners in the government, in the non-profit sector, NGOs. So there are lots of different organizations and institutions that can benefit from greater.

Ashley Reichheld:

 I wanna put an economic value to that because we talked about the good of society and things that we can all smile about, but the truth is there's also economic value behind that. There were two researchers, Paul Zack, and Steve Knack, whose names we love by the way. They showed that a 15% rise in a nation's belief that most people can be trusted adds a full percentage point to economic growth every year. 

So, at the time we wrote the book, if we increased our trust by 15%, that would add almost 850 billion to annual GDP. We're talking big numbers here. So, trust is not just a kind human thing to do, it's an economic imperative.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

It’s fantastic. And I love the different insights in the book, and we just touched on the very surface of it. 

So, for the audience to find out more about the book and be able to connect with you or follow your content, where would you send them?

Ashley Reichheld: 

You should check out thefourfactorsoftrust.com. You'll find a bunch of online tools to help you, including, I think, a downloadable portion of the book. You'll find. Other connections and articles, as well as the survey questions themselves and the four factors. And you'll also find a link to our online brand index. 

Mahan, I know you referenced that throughout our call, but what we've done is tried to share the data. So, you can go online and you can actually look at trust scores. How they vary by category and industry. You can play around with the data and see how they vary by demographic. 

You can also go in and quantify impact on behavior change. If I build my trust, how much more purchase in advocacy, you can also evaluate the economic impact, so we'd encourage people to check it out. It's thefourfactorsoftrust.com.

Mahan Tavakoli: 

I really appreciate the fact that you've provided all of that for leaders of organizations and teams to be able to both dig deeper into the data and also reflect on how they can bring their teams and their organizations along. 

You reference a couple of things I wanted to emphasize before wrapping up. From your book, did you know that trusted companies outperform their peers by up to 400%. 

That customers who trust the brand are 88% more likely to buy again, and that 79% of employees who trust their employer are more motivated to work and less likely to leave? The importance of trust is at an all time high, just as our inclination to trust at an all time low. 

Building trust is your single greatest opportunity to create competitive advantage. I really appreciate the research that you did for this book and sharing all the data and all the content so more of us can make sure that we help our teams, organizations, and the broader community be able to have greater trust and get closer to the vision that you have for us.

Thank you so much for joining the conversation, Ashley and Amelia.

Ashley Reichheld: 

Thank you for having us. It was a lot of fun.