Quanta Corporate Citizenship Who do you trust? 22/04/2010
Have you ever heard stories of someone who wouldn’t leave their job even when offered a significantly higher salary? Or people who would switch jobs for much lower packages? Have you ever heard about friends considering leaving the corporate sector to work for charities? Have you ever wonder why?
A purpose in life certainly plays a big role on it, but have you ever considered what ‘purpose in life’ really means? The methodology we developed at Quanta divides it in 3-dimensions: an utilitarian one (‘what makes me happy?’), an ideological one (‘what the world needs?’) and a pragmatic one (‘what can I do about it?’).
A recent research called Trust and Well-being, by professors John Helliwell and Shun Wang, from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, have revealed some very interesting facts about the first dimension. They were able to establish strong statistical links between trust and human well-being.
Accordingly to their findings, individuals living in what they believe to be a trustworthy environment have much higher levels of subjective well-being. For instance, worldwide data shows that living in a society where you believe a stranger will return your wallet if you lose it represents “the same increase in subjective well-being that would be associated with an increase of household income of about two-thirds”. Let me repeat it again: living in a place where you trust strangers represents in terms of your overall well-being the same as almost doubling your whole family income.
If this is not a striking enough fact, this one certainly is: using Canadian data, they found out that “having high trust in co-workers, which we find to be the largest of all the specific directional trust measures, is associated with 7.6% higher life satisfaction. This is followed by trust in neighbours (5%), confidence in police (3%), and a belief that a stranger would return your lost wallet (2.5%)”. In other words, trusting those you work with represents an increment on well-being more than 3 times larger than trusting that your wallet will be returned by a stranger.
That means that working with people you trust could generate, in terms of wellbeing, the same positive impact as an increase of 200% on your whole household income. Now, imagine two companies: one paying an average salary of US$100k per year and another one paying an average salary of $300k per year, both generating exactly the same well-being to their employees. Or, as they put it, “these effects are all very large when measured in terms of the income changes that would produce the same consequences for life satisfaction.”
And how you build trust? In the words of Helliwell and Wang, “trust is built on a base of shared positive experience, and is nurtured by continued connections”. Improvements on education, membership to social groups, personal background, time working for the organisation and how easy it is to meet and interact with peers in a friendly way are all paramount to building the sense of belonging, which is directly correlated and a trigger for trust. Or as they put it “more attention [should] be paid to creating the time and spaces for social connections to flower. Since more and more people are living in large urban areas with mobile and sometimes rootless populations, it is ever more important to design and manage urban areas in ways that foster levels of engagement that support mutual trust and hence well-being”.
We can easily apply their recommendations to the corporate reality, where companies are becoming larger and more multi-cultural, and where employee tenure is reducing drastically, and physical fragmentation hinders daily contacts.
We often hear that CSR is an add-on, a ‘fluffy’ subject, a PR exercise. Except if an organisation is prepared to live with payrolls that are three times larger than their competitors to generate the same level of employee engagement, it is not. And trust is just another jigsaw piece in a very large CSR puzzle. The numbers above show very clearly how simple aspects of social responsibility can completely change the competitive advantage of an organisation.
- Gus
A purpose in life certainly plays a big role on it, but have you ever considered what ‘purpose in life’ really means? The methodology we developed at Quanta divides it in 3-dimensions: an utilitarian one (‘what makes me happy?’), an ideological one (‘what the world needs?’) and a pragmatic one (‘what can I do about it?’).
A recent research called Trust and Well-being, by professors John Helliwell and Shun Wang, from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, have revealed some very interesting facts about the first dimension. They were able to establish strong statistical links between trust and human well-being.
Accordingly to their findings, individuals living in what they believe to be a trustworthy environment have much higher levels of subjective well-being. For instance, worldwide data shows that living in a society where you believe a stranger will return your wallet if you lose it represents “the same increase in subjective well-being that would be associated with an increase of household income of about two-thirds”. Let me repeat it again: living in a place where you trust strangers represents in terms of your overall well-being the same as almost doubling your whole family income.
If this is not a striking enough fact, this one certainly is: using Canadian data, they found out that “having high trust in co-workers, which we find to be the largest of all the specific directional trust measures, is associated with 7.6% higher life satisfaction. This is followed by trust in neighbours (5%), confidence in police (3%), and a belief that a stranger would return your lost wallet (2.5%)”. In other words, trusting those you work with represents an increment on well-being more than 3 times larger than trusting that your wallet will be returned by a stranger.
That means that working with people you trust could generate, in terms of wellbeing, the same positive impact as an increase of 200% on your whole household income. Now, imagine two companies: one paying an average salary of US$100k per year and another one paying an average salary of $300k per year, both generating exactly the same well-being to their employees. Or, as they put it, “these effects are all very large when measured in terms of the income changes that would produce the same consequences for life satisfaction.”
And how you build trust? In the words of Helliwell and Wang, “trust is built on a base of shared positive experience, and is nurtured by continued connections”. Improvements on education, membership to social groups, personal background, time working for the organisation and how easy it is to meet and interact with peers in a friendly way are all paramount to building the sense of belonging, which is directly correlated and a trigger for trust. Or as they put it “more attention [should] be paid to creating the time and spaces for social connections to flower. Since more and more people are living in large urban areas with mobile and sometimes rootless populations, it is ever more important to design and manage urban areas in ways that foster levels of engagement that support mutual trust and hence well-being”.
We can easily apply their recommendations to the corporate reality, where companies are becoming larger and more multi-cultural, and where employee tenure is reducing drastically, and physical fragmentation hinders daily contacts.
We often hear that CSR is an add-on, a ‘fluffy’ subject, a PR exercise. Except if an organisation is prepared to live with payrolls that are three times larger than their competitors to generate the same level of employee engagement, it is not. And trust is just another jigsaw piece in a very large CSR puzzle. The numbers above show very clearly how simple aspects of social responsibility can completely change the competitive advantage of an organisation.
- Gus
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