Fortune Magazine released their Top 100 companies to work for in 2011. Through the Great Place to Work Institute they received and analyzed surveys from 311 companies and came up with this list. It didn’t surprise me that my favorite place to shop, REI, made the top ten. Any of the results surprise you? About two thirds of the score is made up of a trust index that measures the employees’ perspectives of leadership’s “credibility, job satisfaction and camaraderie. The other third of the score is derived from a culture audit.
But, does a high trust score have a strong correlation to the bottom line of a business or ministry?
According to the Spring 2011 issue of Leader To Leader (a publication of the Peter Drucker Foundation), in 2005 the companies with the highest trust factor achieved returns that were over four times greater than the rest of the market (per 2005 Russell Investment Group report). They also cited a PricewaterhouseCoopers report that found the top distinguishing characteristic between the best innovators and the worst was trust. And they found that “Evidence exists linking trust to the ability to create adaptive organizations, form strategic alliances, and work in virtual teams.”
It certainly seems intuitive that trust would be a positive component of any organization. But, did it surprise you that the correlation would be that strong? How would you evaluate the level of trust in your organization? Next week we’ll look at the components of building trust in an organization.
