Why trust culture is essential for growth, and how to foster it

tl;dr

Practicing trust and having the right attitude and expectations in my work relationships has allowed me to grow in my career and love my job while doing it.

Introduction

I’m happy at my job. I’m not sure if many people get to say that (and mean it).

What’s different about this experience and past experiences?

• I’m constantly growing in both technical and soft skills.
• I’m not involved in or distracted by unnecessary conflicts.
• There’s transparency in the organization.
• I feel empowered to be transparent.

All of the listed points are products of a strong trust culture. In this post I’ll be going over what I have found effective to grow as an individual and as well as a team member, and how it all ties back to having trust in each other.

This post is for those who:

1. Want to grow in their career.
2. Enjoy working in a team (or want to start enjoying working in a team).

Practicing trust in work relationships

There are several different levels of work relationships. I’ve noticed that trust exists in all of these levels but manifest in different ways.

Trust between you and your manager

If you want to grow, you need to be given the space and opportunity to do so. Your manager needs to trust that you’ll use the time, space, and opportunity given to you well. You need to trust that they’ll stick up for you and act with your interests in mind.

Having a good relationship with your manager means that they understand and are interested in your personal goals; they want to help you succeed by developing your goals and providing you with any resources they can.

On my team, we each build and maintain trust with our manager by having weekly 30-minute one-on-one meetings. During this time, I usually bring up my personal goals and corresponding progress, any new types of tasks I want to try, and other thoughts/concerns regarding what is going on at work.

At the end of each session, I’m usually asked the question: “What can I do to help you do your job better?”, which is followed by a discussion of what actions my manager can take to help me achieve what I want to achieve.

I find these sessions very beneficial because:

• It’s very helpful to have a weekly check-in (and someone to help keep me accountable) on my goals.
• I can usually make better reflections on events and ideas when I’m describing them to someone else.
• It’s a window where I can provide and ask for personal feedback.
• We’re creating actionable items for my manager that will in turn create space for me to focus on what matters more to me.
• It gives time for my manager to get to know me better and, therefore, what I want (or would want) to do. There have been countless opportunities offered to me as a result of my manager snagging them for me with my goals in mind.

Trust between you and your team

Those who play music in bands and/or played team sports may relate: I personally find that growing together with a group of people is very rewarding — in a way very different from what’s experienced in personal growth.

Building up a sense of camaraderie with your team is important, but it’s a whole other level to be in a group where everyone is actively interested in helping each other improve as individuals, as well as in improving as a whole.

On my team, we trust each other to:

1. Want to constantly improve as a team.
2. Have our team member’s back in their pursuits and personal goals.
3. Share what we know with each other.

Improving as a team — We’re not afraid to give (and receive) feedback.

A past experience:

• At a previous organization, developers had no say in what we were going to work on and how we were going to do it — these were discussed in exclusive meetings by managers and other “higher-ups”. Plans for execution were then shared with the developers, with no transparency behind how the plans were fabricated. Any feedback from developers regarding these plans generally weren’t actioned on. This inevitably led to large distrust between the “decision-makers” and developers, and very low team morale.
• I’ve also found that, in organizations that don’t have official avenues for providing meaningful feedback to peers, direct constructive feedback is rare. The lack of constructive feedback then leads to minimal growth (in both technical and soft skills) amongst teams and their individual members, and can also create a toxic culture of indirect negative feedback.

On my current team, we aim to create a feedback-rich environment by conducting practices including:

• Taking into consideration engineers’ input during the initial analysis phase for problems we want to solve as a team when determining the schedule and timeline of these projects.
• Having retrospectives every three weeks where we celebrate any successes, analyze any failures, and brainstorm for improvements to try as a team.
• Bringing up concerns on Slack (regarding how we approach issues, what work processes are working or not working, etc.) to discuss and hopefully develop a solution for, when we don’t want to wait for a retro.
• Calling each other out (including our superiors) when any actions/habits/reactions don’t align with our team goals.

Having each other’s backs

We’re also not afraid to bring up ideas for experiments to try as a team. Sometimes these experiments lead us to success in ways we don’t plan for.

For example, months before the pandemic, we saw the benefits of and were interested in remote-first teams. At the time, we had a flexible work-from-home policy but most teams worked full-time in the office.

Our team decided to research methods on how to work effectively as a distributed team and experimented with such methods such as async communication. We conducted weeks-worth of these experiments, not knowing that it actually would lead us to a seamless transition into full-time remote work when the pandemic hit.

Sharing what we know

We are keen to share technical knowledge with each other.

A past experience:

• At a previous organization I was shamed by a superior for not having some specific technical knowledge. After asking me to complete a small task I was unfamiliar with (and therefore was slow with), they decided to complete the task themselves and then tell me how easy it was to Google how to do it. Needless to say, I lost my trust in this person, and considered my team an unavailable resource for learning; moreover, this was effectively a lost learning opportunity that could have increased the overall skill set of the team.

If a team member is having trouble understanding a concept, we should have the capacity to teach them, for the betterment of the team (we’re only as fast as our slowest teammate!).

I’ve always found that showing someone how to do something can be one of the fastest ways to spread knowledge. On our team, we can trust that we’ll be treated with respect by our team members when we admit that we don’t know something.

Here are a couple examples of how my current team has shared knowledge in the past:

• One of our team members hosted a general overview for the backend codebase for the frontend developers on the team.
• We encouraged one of our more knowledgeable team members to step back from answering questions regarding the feature that we work on. By doing this, we gave those who have less experience/expertise a chance to learn the context to be able to answer the questions.

Trust between you and the organization

As mentioned before, one needs space to grow. Work-life balance is incredibly important when it comes to being able to be productive; productivity is essential to growth.

A past experience:

• At another organization, we were given the minimal amount of days off, had no work-from-home policy, and were required to provide reasons for scheduling time off for appointments. I was once discouraged to take a full day off for a long midday appointment that required a long commute from the office.
• The restrictive time-off policy led to burn-out, low team morale, and low productivity.
• It’s hard to care about the organization (and sometimes, as a result, the work you do) if the organization doesn’t treat you like a responsible adult human that needs time to rest and recuperate.

Rigid schedules and long hours might work for some, but here, we believe in diversity, including that of work style.

We, team members at Procurify, are entrusted with the privileges of:

• Responsible time-off (aka unlimited vacation days)
• 4-day work weeks
• Fully remote workstyle (flexible hours, flexible location)

and we build our trust with the organization through:

• Monthly AMA’s with the company’s leaders
• Constant encouragement to manifest one of our company core values, “Courage” by calling out policies/actions/team members when something doesn’t seem quite right.
• Seeing actual actions come out of employee feedback, such as our “Donate Your Day” program, where one can donate a portion (of their choice) of their salary to a selected cause.

To nurture trust, you must actively practice it

Actively practicing trust in my different work relationships has yielded great results:

• There is peace in trust. Just like peaceful physical spaces, peaceful relationships leave much more room for better productivity.
• Actively working towards common goals, making improvements together, and being able to call out bullshit boosts team morale and in turn, we have a more engaged community.
• Knowing that the organization, my team, and my manager have my back makes me feel safe and more motivated to try new things and take on challenges.
• I am fulfilled by my career since there is obvious consistent growth and improvement.
• Being happy at work makes it a lot easier to be happier in life.

I’m not trying to convey my workplace as some sort of utopian situation — it’s not. We make mistakes, both individually and collectively. Our practices aren’t perfect, and not everything goes swimmingly according to plan.

What I’ve learned, and what I want to get across, is that when everything is built on a foundation of trust, we create an environment where we’re set up to only get better.

About Procurify

Procurify is a leading all-in-one spend management solution that helps mission-driven organizations deliver tracking, accountability, and end-to-end workflows for expenses and spending.

We’re always hiring new team members. To find out more about how you can get involved with life at Procurify, visit here: www.procurify.com/careers.