Social media platforms are a great place for sharing content and communicating with others, but they’re also a great place for misinformation and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, in the last few years, many consumers have lost a lot of trust in brands, and trust levels sank even lower when people started sharing misinformation about the pandemic and the vaccines even if doing positive public relations.
Aside from brands, trust in scientists, the government, and the media has also decreased. While trust isn’t easily quantifiable, the effects of the decrease have been noticeable all over the world. Additionally, rebuilding trust is incredibly difficult once it’s lost, but that’s precisely what makes communicators and their work so important.
One of the biggest outcomes of the pandemic is that many have lost trust in business leaders
Furthermore, many business owners started to wonder whether their employees were actually working while they were working remotely. The most important element for building trust is communication, and many business leaders haven’t done a great job of communicating their future plans with their employees.
While some business owners have made their own decisions throughout the pandemic without communicating with their colleagues about it, others have barely been communicating with anyone inside their companies at all. All of that leads to a lack of trust in businesses.
According to a recent study, more than half of all supervisors in the last couple of years have doubted or have been unsure whether employees working remotely performed well or were motivated to work. On the other hand, the demand for software for employee surveillance has greatly increased since the start of the pandemic. Yet many businesses have reported that their employees have been more productive, which goes against the idea that business owners have to watch their employees at their desks to know that they’re working.
Trust is about two elements: character and competence
Both of those two elements mean that the employee in question has integrity and is able to deliver high-quality work. Many times, trust is created with the simplest acts—doing what’s already been promised, when it was promised. It’s the job of communicators everywhere to build trust with both internal and external audiences. Those communicators also have to make sure that trust between a company and its target audience is always high, and that it never falters. Those goals mean companies have to continuously be honest and communicate with their audience, which, while important in the last couple of years, is going to be even more important in the future.
