‘Every organization has to be true to who they are’: UKG CEO on how managers build trust with their teams

“The hub is a solution that takes an organization’s HR metrics and turns those into opportunities to build inclusive, equitable cultures,” says UKG CEO Chris Todd.

Great Place To Work has been collecting data on corporate performance through its Trust Index Model (TIM) surveys since 1992, providing UKG with troves of surveys, reports, and historical rankings to fuel its hub. Todd says the service will also provide users suggestions on how to improve their rankings and hit goals built on the TIM pillars.

In short, the Great Place To Work Hub helps organizations track performance metrics based on goals that are relevant to Great Place To Work standards, and lets users compare their performance to other companies in similar fields. 

There is a payoff to companies aligning more with Great Place To Work standards. “Great Place To Work certified organizations outperform the market,” Todd says, and ranking high on trust factors specifically leads to even better results, as “Great Place To Work-certified organizations that have high trust cultures outperform in that cohort.”

What’s most interesting to me about GPTW’s Trust Model is that it provides a lens for what trust looks like from an employee’s point of view (“Am I respected?” “Is my job meaningful?” “Are my managers trustworthy?”) as well as what trust should mean from a manager’s perspective.

GPTW identifies nine areas where “leader and manager actions, behaviors, and communications have the greatest impact on the level of trust in an organization.” They are Hiring, Inspiring Speaking, Listening, Thanking, Developing, Caring, Celebrating, and Sharing.

I’ll leave you all to visit their website to get an explanation on what those actions mean, but it was Inspiring that caught my eye. GPTW says managers should inspire employees to see “how they contribute to the company’s higher purpose.” 

Certainly numerous surveys show employees are drawn to ethical companies that serve some sort of greater purpose, however tertiary it might be. But you could also pull out a ream of reports suggesting younger employees are rejecting the idea of finding purpose through work and serving a company’s goals, instead embracing “quiet quitting,” “lying flat,” and job hopping.

I asked Todd whether he saw a generational divide in how employees measure trust in a company and he said that he tends “to be suspicious of those broad categorizations” but that UKG certainly adapts to employee needs based on where they are in their careers, rather than when they were born.

“We meet people where they are on their career journeys, when they’ll have different expectations and goals. We tried to build an organization that is reflective of and responsive to that,” Todd says.

That’s a tough but vital job for a manager, adapting to employee needs. People may choose to work at a company for any number of reasons—money, convenience, purpose—so a one-size-fits-all approach to trust building might not work. But a corporation can at least narrow the range of requirements by establishing a strong corporate culture and hiring people who best fit.

“At the core, every organization has to be true to who they are,” Todd says.

Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com

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TRUST EXERCISE

“Even though the desire to achieve broader impact through ESG is good, the devil is in the details: the measurement and choice of metrics are enormously important, and the absence of clarity and consensus around them will introduce significant noise into investors’ portfolio choice conundrum.”

Two researchers in an op-ed for Fortune say they studied 235 stocks and found that ESG metrics “don’t just make a portfolio less profitable, but also less likely to achieve its stated ESG aims.” The issue is that ESG metrics are still too unregulated and diverse, which means stock pickers suffer “estimation risk,” which devalues their portfolio.