How Addressing Organizational Weaknesses Engages Employees and Builds Trust

Today’s organizational climate is suffering an employee engagement epidemic. According to Gallup, 85% of employees are not engaged or actively engaged, and part of this is a decline in organizational trust. 

Chances are, there are employees in your organization who are having a difficult time trusting leadership and finding motivation for what they do.

Identifying organizational weaknesses with employees is one of the most beneficial ways to engage your team and strengthen trust. Here’s how to do it.

Identify Areas of Opportunity 

Every business needs improvement. Developing processes and organizational procedures that identify weak areas can promote growth and engagement, and the first step is to identify the areas you’re already familiar with. By analyzing what’s going right in the company and what needs some work, you’ll be equipped to begin a growth track.

The second step is to listen. Before laying out what you notice, it’s important to let employees voice their own concerns. By listening first, you get unfiltered, uninfluenced feedback on what needs to change. Giving people this opportunity will allow them to feel like they matter and that their voices are heard.

Create Organizational Trust with Transparency

Employees already know what the problems are. They’re at the front lines, dealing firsthand with the operations of your business. They see weaknesses at the ground level, and if managers don’t feel their team members are identifying weaknesses, they need to build organizational trust. For employees to actively look for ways to improve the business, they need to feel confident and motivated.

When managers build confidence and organizational trust by acknowledging weaknesses and listening to his or her team’s suggestions, they’ll quickly see the employee engagement they’ve been hoping for.

Transparency Requires Vulnerability

Sometimes managers feel they need to be perfect without flaws, thinking they’ll gain more respect and their team will work to please them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, it does the opposite and creates intimidation. 

Employees Want to Connect with Bosses

Be vulnerable. Harvard Business Review writes, “Brené Brown, an expert on social connection, conducted thousands of interviews to discover what lies at the root of social connection. A thorough analysis of the data revealed what it was: vulnerability.” 

Social connection requires managers to be transparent with the weaknesses in an organization and within themselves. When your team connects with you, employee engagement improves.

Solve Weaknesses Together

Employees get motivated and find purpose in the organization when they become part of the decision making process. When managers present issues and invite their team to voice their ideas, they become part of the solution. First, train managers to show initiation and solve problems instead of only voicing them. Second, build a better company culture and sense of ownership. 

In the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast, the host says, “When you delegate tasks, you create followers, but when you delegate authority, you create leaders... You can have control, or you can have growth, but you can’t have both.” A great team of leaders requires managers to not just hand out tasks, but to give them responsibilities and the space to creatively own them. 

Solving weaknesses together not only jumpstarts employee engagement, but it also encourages immediate implementation. One of the most challenging parts of leading a business isn’t making a decision for employees – it’s the time it takes for changes to be adopted. 

When you abandon making all decisions for employees and instead do so with them, the implementation process can become much quicker. 

Promote Future Growth

Success naturally breeds more success. When managers develop organizational procedures that harbor teamwork on weaknesses in the company, and they see positive change, they’ll engage even more next time. If managers are consistent about how they identify and deal with weaknesses, they’ll see positive engagement from their team. 

Not only will employee engagement improve, but so will confidence and organizational trust. A successful manager will ensure the following principle is true: when the business improves, the employees improve. 

As the business grows, your company culture should grow. Becoming a workplace people want to be a part of is important. Employees want to matter. They want to make a difference. Share weaknesses and let them be part of the process to give them the purpose they crave. 

Healthy Teams Breed Healthy Business

A happy team treats customers well and the company’s reputation grows as a result. A good reputation creates a strong brand, so promote future growth one day at a time by connecting with team members.

Build the Right Culture 

Taking initiative to engage employees and build trust isn’t difficult. Follow a guideline of steps to ensure that culture improvement happens at a consistent level.

Employee Engagement

Find ways to engage employees throughout the day. Having them be part of your conversation about organizational weaknesses is a big part of that.

Organizational Trust

Without trust, you don’t have an effective team. Create ways to reinforce trust, consistently showing employees that they are valued and their opinions matter.

Organizational Procedures Designed for Effective Teams

Create processes that ensure consistency and effective ways to communicate feedback on the company. Remove all friction to express concerns and ideas.

When a manager addresses organizational weaknesses to his or her team, it will help to increase engagement and strengthen trust. Communicate in a welcoming way to develop a healthy team culture. 

All this leads to an even deeper root of team success: treat employees like family, as they too have weaknesses, strengths, dreams, and expectations. When managers connect with them and learn what gets people motivated, they can facilitate a healthy productive team. Care about people to create an engaged team of workers. 

Not Sure Where to Start?

One way to get started on building trust and improving employee engagement is utilizing a tool that develops engagement for you. 

Olumo provides a simple way for employees to give anonymous feedback on workplace topics through simple text-message surveys that collect actionable data in real-time. Our SMS surveys receive a high response rate because of how easy they are to use.

When you use this technology, you can quickly jumpstart a culture with employees that feel their voices matter. You’ll soon be headed to a productive journey of growth for the business.