By Emmanuelle Rivet
Trust is the basis for the entire tech landscape. It’s the reason consumers are willing to exchange their personal data for digital experiences, to test unproven apps, and to work remotely without fear of productivity loss.
So how do you build up stores of this essential capital? In a well-meaning attempt to establish (or, in some cases, reestablish) trust with stakeholders, many companies have created new systems, processes, and initiatives that have the feeling of being bolted on after the fact. As a result, trust doesn’t become an integral component of business models, strategies, or the technologies itself. In a way, companies aren’t competing on trust; they’re trying catch up to it.
To be sure, no organization is the same or will have the same vulnerabilities or advantages when it comes to deploying or developing new technologies. Yet there are clear actions firms can take to create stronger trust frameworks in four areas.
- Workforce
Doing the right thing within your workforce can go a long way to engender trust. Testing new technological solutions with your employees provides an opportunity to create feedback loops where employees can identify risks and challenges, and the employer can acknowledge and respond. At the same time, employee diversity and training is also key. A workforce with diverse skill sets and experiences can help leaders understand the potential gains and downside risks of technology. A diversity of backgrounds can also help executives ensure that technology systems are designed and trained with the least possible biases, and to guarantee that products and services are relevant for the consumer groups targeted across geographies, age groups, and lifestyles.
- Innovation
Critically, companies should build trust into their innovation architecture. One decision factor must be how a breakthrough technology solution will benefit broader society and the ecosystem in which the company operates. This begins at the first conception of an idea. A “ship quick” mentality is all well and good and can take your business a long way. But firms need to find early ways to build a responsibility mindset into the “minimal viable product” culture. Quick and dirty also risks being quick and irresponsible when the goal should still be quick but also responsible.
- Governance
Companies must be honest and explicit about future risks, and continuously revisit questions to build foresight and detect shifting trends early. Appropriate governance mechanisms are especially critical. Risk-tolerance levels and decision-making factors must be clearly understood by everyone across the company, and leadership must be able to communicate and coordinate quickly and without ambiguity when new risks arise and must be addressed. With the right tools and frameworks in place, companies reduce their risk of being caught off-guard.
- Ecosystems
Companies shouldn’t think they have to go it alone. A broad ecosystem of outside experts and collaborators can help with the ethical design of technology tools, business models, and virtually all aspects of technologies. These collaborators should include members of academia, civil societies, employee groups, and startups. In the end, ensuring trust principles can be fulfilled requires the entire tech ecosystem to be on the same page. Unless those are made clear and agreed on, there’s a strong risk that words will just remain words and not actions.
What Does Trust Mean to You?
Yet before beginning this journey, it’s critical to define what trust means to you and continue to iterate on this definition every year or every six months and communicate that definition to employees, customers, and shareholders. The most well-intended trust efforts will do little good without a North Star.
Contact us
