How to Show Employees and Customers Who You Really Are

Maybe it goes without saying that the employee loyalty crisis affects rates of employee engagement, which haven’t improved significantly in 30 years. But the conversation around employee loyalty and engagement is just that — a conversation. And last year, the founders of Great Place to Work spent thousands of hours of interviews and focus groups just listening. The researchers theorized which factors were most essential to employees judging a company a great place to work.

“For pretty much every theory we had, we found consistent exceptions,” says Sarah Lewis-Kulin, vice president of global recognition. “What we didn’t find an exception for was trust.”

MIT research also cites trust as a key driver of engagement. Employees who trust their company are 260 percent more motivated to work and are 50 percent less likely to look for another job. But MIT also found that roughly one in four workers don’t trust their employer. And one can imagine the implications of a trusting or mistrusting customer.

So how do you earn the trust of employees, customers, and your community? Merely asking people to trust you doesn’t build trust. You build a high-trust culture over time.

When I learned that Great Place to Work’s research defined a culture of trust by its credibility, respect, and fairness, something else came to mind: a concept Welty Building Company calls “OPTICs.” I was introduced to the idea when I began working with Welty to bring the company to even greater trust and transparency. OPTICs is based on the following:

• Openness: We are candid and direct, open-minded. We embrace new ways to learn, grow, and adapt.
• Passion: We are excited about our work, driven by our purpose, and passionate about performance and innovation. We care intensely about the company’s success and have an insatiable thirst for excellence.
• Teamwork: We embrace the “world of co” — collaborating and co-creating with our colleagues and customers. We build a safe environment for participation and inclusion.
• Integrity: We trust others fairly and build trusting relationships. We uphold an unwavering commitment to ethical conduct and ensure no harm is caused. We set and manage expectations based on the realities of the situation.
• Customer-centricity: We think and act with our internal and external customers — and their customers — in mind. We listen — always striving to learn more about our customers’ businesses so we can better anticipate their wants and needs.

Economic Engagement, the management approach I helped Welty implement, was a natural fit with OPTICs — the five drivers of Economic Engagement are customer engagement, economic understanding, transparency, performance compensation, and employee participation. Our focus was improving the company’s economic understanding and performance compensation, so we designed an incentive plan to ensure employees partook in the wealth they helped create. It’s through this transparency that Welty treats employees like partners — sharing information, being clear on common goals, shouting out successes, and learning from mistakes together.

In president and owner Don Taylor’s tenure at Welty, trust was certainly cultivated over time — one crisis at a time, in fact. His first year as CEO was 1999, and plenty of people were rushing around, expecting the world to end in Y2K. But Don slowed down, taking the time to get to know customers deeply and preparing his team for the aftermath of the frenzy. During that critical time, Welty developed foundational relationships in health care that have now carried the company for decades.

A couple of years later, Welty was set to be approved for a major airport expansion on a Thursday. By Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the project was understandably off the table. The team had been counting on the work. So instead of becoming more cautious, Welty promised to go after even more jobs — nothing was certain, and this meant it was time to be aggressive.

A few years later, the approach paid off — big time. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, projects were plummeting and so were Welty’s competitors. But due to the significant backlog they’d built, Welty had a clear advantage. This strength and depth landed them Goodyear’s headquarters project, and learning how to finance it set the foundation for a development company, which now serves Sherwin Williams, Welty’s largest project today. 

Maybe it’s true that people reveal who they are under pressure.

Just last year, Welty finished construction of Tyler’s Redemption Place, a relapse prevention and wellness center. They were specifically selected for the project by Hope United, a nonprofit working with those impacted by the drug, alcohol, and suicide epidemics. Don explained Welty’s reputation for hiring employees with a history of addiction: “Everyone deserves a second, and maybe even third or fourth, chance. If we can help those who have struggled to get back on their feet, we have done good for both them and society. We really are in the people business.”

Being in the people business for 20 years has built trust with employees, customers, and the community. The combination of OPTIC values and Economic Engagement has too. Welty is now three times as profitable with half the number of employees as it was at its inception. Turnover is low, and profit sharing is high. Welty’s sales have increased over twentyfold; profits have increased by over ninetyfold. And all this while the S&P 500 increased by just four-to-fivefold.

Results like this are consistent with the research we’ve shared here in Inc., which showed just how powerful the transparency and trust built by Economic Engagement can be. While the semantics differ, the operational similarity between OPTICs and Economic Engagement is obvious. The impact is too. Good things may take time, but that’s how you know they’re built to last. Don puts it like this: “I know I’ve made far more money than I’ve lost by trusting people and being a good friend, versus a super scheming, hard-deal-driving business guy.” Just like loyalty, trust is reciprocal