How much trust exists between you and your employees?

This isn't just an idle, theoretical question. The fact is, if you could instill the right amount of trust in your workplace, you and your employees would be a lot happier.

That's what John F. Helliwell has discovered, and you can trust his research. Dr. Helliwell, one of the most respected economists in the world, is the Arthur J.E. Child Foundation Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a member of the National Statistics Council, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has taught at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia; advised the Bank of Canada; and published many books and articles on economic topics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

But now Dr. Helliwell is studying what makes him -- and everyone else -- happy. Applying the tools of economics to the subject of well-being, Dr. Helliwell has discovered a number of factors that affect life satisfaction. Work is chief among them, says Dr. Helliwell, and trust in coworkers and management has an enormous effect. That's because trust is essential to both workplace engagement and life satisfaction in general. But issues of trust play out in funny ways in the office.

In this interview, the first of two parts, Dr. Helliwell explores the connection between distrust and unionization, why too much paperwork can cause workers to feel less engaged, and why we are apt to keep office politics alive, even when it makes us unhappy.

GMJ: What have you found regarding the effects of workplace trust on life satisfaction?

Dr. Helliwell: When we ask about life satisfaction and trust, it turns out that trust is enormously highly correlated with life satisfaction. Just moving up one point on a ten-point scale of trust in your management has the life satisfaction equivalence of something like a one-third increase in income.

Of course, a variety of aspects of what goes on in your life are more important than your income. To work in a pleasant atmosphere, one in which you feel you can trust the people around you, turns out to be very important for people. Lots of people routinely overestimate the life satisfaction they will get from consumption, and they routinely underestimate [the life satisfaction] they will get from human interactions.

So when choosing jobs, people routinely do things like concentrating on income. That ends up making them less happy than they would have been had they chosen a better workplace.

GMJ: You've found some interesting differences in workplace trust among union and nonunion workers.

Dr. Helliwell: Yes. When we ask, "What is the level of trust among colleagues in your workplace?" we've found that there's no difference between union members and nonunion members, looking across the whole population. But you find that trust in management is systematically lower among respondents who are union members.

You could imagine the linkages two ways. A low-trust environment is exactly the kind of environment that would either demand or be open to union organization. It's also probably true that the people involved in both sides of the union negotiations within a workplace are inclined to create and maintain "us versus them" distinctions, and acrimonious relations would be damaging to trust relations. Another feature of this is that although union members are much lower in their trust in management, they are no lower in life satisfaction.

GMJ: Why is that?

Dr. Helliwell: Perhaps the union provides them protection in the workplace for the consequences of their low trust in management. A union shop is more rule-determined, and there are more, as it were, defenses for the individual worker. In an unsatisfactory situation, the existence of the union and the solidarity the workers feel might give them a kind of protection against what otherwise would be the risks they'd suffer by not trusting the people who had control over their workplace.

This is guesswork at this stage -- we haven't gotten enough evidence to unpack that. But it's interesting that somehow, although there is a tight relationship between trust in the workplace and life satisfaction on average, unionized workers are not less happy than nonunionized workers, which means the union itself must be providing something. But what it isn't providing is trust in management.

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Article from The Gallup Management Journal