Image by: Tandguladze
By Victor Averin

Trust is an important asset to every company and business and it cannot be measured like inventory, equipment, and time resources. What sets a company apart is the strength of it’s trust in their employees and overall transparency which brings the heart and soul of a company to life and becomes the catalyst for success.

The “People” Business

You must analyze the quality of relationships across your organization – leaders to employees, employees to employees, and employees to customers. In each category look for specific traits to determine whether or not everyone honors and respects one another, here’s an indirect way to measure them—

Employees are loyal and keep their word, never judge but seek to understand, laugh with others and not at others, take issues to the source, appreciate the organization, help one another, smile frequently, and start sentences with “How can I help you?”

Look for these critical traits. Trust permeates through every aspect, department of the company, and out into the public to you’re customers, which is why trust is considered a non-negotiable trait.

Transparency

Being transparent as a company shows that you own your failures, learn from them, and share them publicly with your employees and your clients. Transparency builds trust. In the long run your company will bounce back even higher after failures and success become transparent.

Over the last few years in the US, corporate scandals, bailouts, and bankruptcies have plagued companies claiming they were for the people but they ended up not being able to put the trust where their mouth is. So instead let’s look at some of the global companies that are leading the world through transparency.

Statoil is an energy company in oil and gas production, many have the belief that big oil businesses have hidden agendas, whereas in fact the most transparent company in the world is an oil company. Statoil discloses all revenues, payments and financial data, sustainability data, operations, case studies, strategies, and risk assessments. They operate internationally and are considered a global leader in Norwegian countries.

As a final example, HSBC is a British multinational banking and financial services located in London, UK. In 2011 it was considered the world’s second largest banking and financial services company and the world’s second largest public company. HSBC pushes for transparency to publish information relating regional loan data to tax information.