Employing People you can Trust

You need people to make your organisation work. You need the right people, people you can trust, to make your organisation a success.

At the risk of being slightly controversial, I believe that these times, where good people are hard to find, and even harder to keep, call for good, old fashioned honesty.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking through hundreds and hundreds of ads on various internet job sites and the thing that scares me is the promises that organisations are making in order to attract people to the job.

From my experience, people are naturally drawn to the promises that meet their needs. ‘Flexible working hours’, ‘work-life balance’, ‘good remuneration package’, ‘great team’, are all great examples of promises I’ve seen recently. The problem is they also create expectations in the minds of the successful applicants.

We know that people join organisations and leave their managers. We also know that the number one reason why employees leave their jobs within the first 6 months is because their expectations have not been met[1].

If you really want to attract and retain good people, here are 7 key things you need to know:

1. ‘good people’, people you can trust, are those who can meet your expectations and needs, but you need to be honest about what those are
2. only make promises in your job ads and interviews that you can and will keep
3. understand the expectations and needs of the people joining your organisation. If you fail to meet them you will break down their trust in you
4. make sure your managers, supervisors and team leaders understand what makes and breaks down trust – they are responsible for people staying or leaving your organisation
5. remember that your marketing and branding makes promises and creates expectations in your existing and future employees minds
6. when you build trust with your employees, managing their expectations, meeting their needs and keeping your promises, they stay
7. when you break the trust of your employees, they leave and tell others about it, or they stay, are unproductive, and drag others down

Let’s look at an example of what can and does happen: