Imagine the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: Your organisation is a relatively new player in the consumer goods industry. Your market share has been growing steadily over the past few years, but your profit margins could be improved. You are about to launch a new product in the market to grow your brand when you find out that your organisation has been involved in a data breach. Customers start losing trust in your brand, as there is no transparency as to how the breach has occurred and with whom their data has been shared. Your new product launch is delayed and you fail to capture a new segment of the market that would have allowed you to increase your profits. What’s more, sales decline as a result of customers boycotting your products.

Scenario 2: You run a global organisation and you have just expanded your operations to a new market. Your new business is going well, until you find out that the suppliers you’ve been working with have been bribing government officials to obtain their contracts. You were hoping to attract more investors to support the acquisition of a small competitor, but in light of this incident, your investors lose trust and you miss out on the opportunity to grow your business. Your stock prices fall as a result of the negative press surrounding the incident.

The stakes, however, are high: A recent Deloitte analysis found examples of three large global companies, each with a market cap of more than US$10 billion, that lost 20% to 56% of their value—a total US$70 billion loss—when they lost their stakeholders’ trust.¹ Trust—or lack thereof—has thus become a mainstay topic in headlines across the world.

Many senior executives recognise the need to build or rebuild trust in their organisations. However, they often struggle to understand exactly how trust can be managed. Indeed, in today’s dynamic and challenging business environment, trust is becoming increasingly complex to understand and manage, especially as organisations are expected to build trust across growing ecosystems of stakeholders and amid evolving expectations.

One of the first steps in managing trust is understanding how it can be defined and measured. Trust is commonly considered an abstract or even nebulous concept and many organisations don’t typically prioritise trust or treat it with the same focus and urgency as they do other business priorities. But the benefits for those companies who are trustworthy are significant. Recent research suggests that these companies outperform the S&P 500 by levels as high as 30% to 50%.²

We propose that trust should be seen as a tangible, strategic and critical asset, given the real, quantifiable value that it can bring to an organisation. And it should be managed much like other key performance indicators on the organisation’s balance sheet, by considering its drivers and implications more deeply across the enterprise. With this perspective, organisational trust should be built from the inside out,³ through levers and actions that cut across the functional areas of a business, from product quality to data protection to financial integrity.

Organisational trust also depends on the needs and perspectives of an organisation’s different stakeholders—board members, investors, customers, suppliers and employees—so the relative impact of trust-building actions must be framed and viewed through the lenses of these stakeholders as well. Organisations that proactively approach trust management in this way can build what we refer to as trust equity, helping create positive impacts on their bottom line and a layer of resilience protecting the organisation against potential breaches of trust. Trust and resilience go hand in hand. Deloitte’s 2022 Consumer products outlook finds that 95% of executives whose companies have high levels of consumer trust believe their companies are more resilient.⁴

This paper offers a statistically verified approach for measuring trust across different operating domains, helping leaders identify their organisation’s potential sources of a trust breakdown or areas where building trust proactively can create a competitive advantage.

Understanding and measuring trust at deeper operating levels

Organisational trust is multifaceted— so to understand, act on and manage it across stakeholders, it may be helpful to consider its different components. At its core, trust is the foundation of a meaningful relationship between an entity and its stakeholders at both individual and organisational levels. Trust is built through actions that demonstrate a high degree of competence and the right intent, which result in demonstrated capability (possessing the means to meet expectations); reliability (consistently and dependably delivering upon promises made); transparency (openly sharing information, motives and choices in plain language); and humanity (genuinely caring for the experience and well-being of others).¹³

Managing an asset as complex as trust thus necessitates a more robust lens; it requires understanding trust-driving activity enterprisewide and through the perspectives and priorities of different stakeholders, including customers, employees, the board, investors/shareholders, communities, regulators, suppliers and others. (See the sidebar, “Stakeholder trust is becoming increasingly complex.”) Only at deeper operating levels and with a multistakeholder perspective can an organisation earn—and when needed, rebuild—trust.

Deloitte interviewed more than 50 internal subject-matter specialists and more than two dozen C-suite executives from global Fortune 500 companies across sectors to identify the operating areas within an organisation that influence trust with different stakeholders. We refer to these operating areas as “domains.” From this list (figure 1), a set of actions was identified that support earning and building trust in each of the given domains.

A trust questionnaire was then built from this analysis and fielded in October 2020, April 2021 and again in September 2021. Nearly 3,000 executives across the globe representing a wide range of industries and sectors were surveyed to understand what actions and operating domains are most important to driving trust in their organisations and sectors and to measure how their organisations are performing relative to peers. Statistical tests indicated a high reliability of these measures,¹⁴ meaning that the trusted actions indeed reflect the domains being measured.

Given the fluid and dynamic nature of business, actions taken in these areas may overlap and complement each other at the same time. For example, cybersecurity actions can be closely linked with data privacy and protection, whereas ethics can be reflected in an organisation’s culture, values and mission statement. Some domains are more customer-facing and front-office–oriented, such as customer experience; while others are more back-office/operationally focussed, such as compliance, strategic governance and financial integrity and health. All domains are important, but, as would be expected, some will be more important than others for different stakeholders, depending on the business and its sector. In our research, we asked senior executives to rate which areas are more important for their business, relative to other areas, in maintaining stakeholder trust (figure 2). For example, executives in the consumer industry in our study are more likely to consider customer experience to be the most important contributor to trusted relationships, in contrast to executives from the energy, resources and industrials industry, who rank product quality to be most important.

As the rankings in figure 2 reveal, organisations recognise the relative importance of trust across these different operating areas and yet their performance levels in building trust across domains may differ. Specifically, in our research, we measured trust performance by asking executives to indicate the extent to which their organisation performs a series of trusted actions related to each operating domain. Consider, for example, the measurement of trust performance in customer experience where we asked respondents the extent to which their organisations prioritise providing superior customer service, including digitally driven experiences.

Trust performance scores for each domain as measured by executives at large global organisations are presented in figure 3. The results indicate that most companies are taking some action in all areas, but there is still room for improvement and thus room to build trust. Interestingly, these trust performance scores suggest businesses are more likely to be better at building trust in areas where they have more experience developing capabilities and taking action. For example, trust performance measures in operating domains such as crime, culture and purpose, compliance and product quality were higher than for domains such as DEI, ESG, or innovation, intelligence and technology. This may indicate that the large organisations that these executives lead have more experience building trust in areas that are essentially table stakes for running a business, such as preventing fraud and crime, developing a supportive organisational culture and improving product quality.

For ESG, organisations can set meaningful goals and targets, review their ESG impact and effectively embed this into financial decisions, all of which can drive “social credibility” and positively impact areas such as talent retention and investment returns^.16

The following examples show specific actions that well-known organisations have taken that build trust in different operating areas and the improved performance metrics they have experienced as a result.

Trust-building in action

Tommy Hilfiger

In 2017, Tommy Hilfiger launched Tommy Adaptive, a line of clothing for people with disabilities. The new line was designed to meet an unmet market need, but, perhaps more significantly, it signalled to stakeholders the company’s intent to help others in a unique way. This helped employees develop a sense of purpose in their jobs, encouraging them to feel that they are making a meaningful, positive contribution to society. Customers also noticed. The feedback captured the success of their campaign:

Operating domains in which trust increases

• Culture and purpose
• DEI
• Customer experience

Patagonia

Patagonia was one of the first clothing companies to use recycled materials such as plastic bottles for its products. It further aimed to reduce its environmental footprint by switching to more sustainable materials such as organic cotton, despite the increased cost of production; it also worked to teach customers how to repair and reuse their gear instead of buying new products. Patagonia encouraged transparency in its supply chain and cut relationships with suppliers using forced labour. Its actions helped enhance trust in multiple ways, particularly through transparency and a commitment to the well-being of its stakeholders. All of these actions translated into increased profits: In 2012, Patagonia’s sales increased by 30% to US$540 million, after running its “Don’t buy this jacket” campaign.¹⁸ Today, Patagonia has a reputation of “shirking profits in favour of doing the right thing.”¹⁹

Operating domains in which trust increases

• ESG
• Ethics
• Customer experience

The Ritz-Carlton

The Ritz-Carlton shows a powerful example of how an organisational culture that promotes purpose and performance can help improve workforce experience and earn stakeholder trust. Its motto, “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” instills respect and a sense of purpose in all employees at the hotel.²⁰ Hotel managers also invite and expect employees to participate in continuous improvement programmes, giving these workers a voice in the operations of the hotel chain. Enhanced employee involvement increases the trust that employees have in their leaders as they can see the value that their participation offers. And by being invited to participate in continuous improvement, the organisation hopes employees are given “a sense of equality and purpose to their jobs.” All of these benefits translate into annual turnover rates (20%) significantly lower than the industry average (78.8%), numerous quality awards and an improved bottom line.²¹

Operating domains in which trust increases

• Culture and purpose
• Workforce experience
• Customer experience

As these examples show, improved performance around these trusted actions can drive positive stakeholder behaviours such as increased employee engagement, higher employee and customer retention rates and customer loyalty. In fact, data suggests that nearly 80% of employees who highly trust their employer feel motivated to work.²² Nearly 90% of customers who highly trust a brand have bought again from that brand and 62% of customers who report highly trusting a brand buy almost exclusively from that brand.²³ Significantly, these improved stakeholder behaviours can contribute to firm operating metrics as well. Employees who are more satisfied in their job tend to be more engaged, delivering greater productivity, lower costs via lower turnover and greater innovation.²⁴ Customers who are more loyal to their brand are more likely to try new products and to spend more, on average, than new customers, resulting in higher margins.²⁵

Making trust actionable: What organisations can do now to start measuring trust at deeper levels of the organisation

In order to manage the expectations of a growing ecosystem of stakeholders, organisations should make trust a strategic priority. While organisations know this, moving from knowledge to action can often be a struggle given the complex nature of trust. There are a number of relatively straightforward steps leaders can take to manage trust as a strategic asset comparable with other critical organisational assets:

• Explore trust levels in your organisation: Develop an understanding and get an initial sense, of what trust expectations exist in the eyes of an organisation’s various stakeholders. Be mindful of the fact that different groups may have different priority areas. Surveys of different stakeholder groups such as employees, customers, or investors can be a helpful tool, as can automated sensing platforms, which are becoming increasingly effective through advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies.
• Diagnose critical gaps: Leverage data, industry benchmarking studies and output from the initial exploration phase to identify the areas within the organisation that may be experiencing trust gaps.
• Prioritise: It is probably not practical or feasible to address all trust gaps across the entire enterprise at one time, so leaders can prioritise focus areas by looking at the implications of each trust driver relative to the strategic priorities of the organisation. Leaders can also consider how their organisation compares with others within their sector or industry, or set their own goals relative to leading indicators of trust-related performance from other industries or sectors.
• Activate: By focussing on the areas that are the most critical to driving trust through specific strategic initiatives, over time, organisations can see an elevation in levels of trust and the corresponding impact on stakeholder behaviour.
• Protect for the future and build trust equity: Because the organisation is constantly evolving as part of a complex ecosystem, trust across operating domains should be measured on an ongoing basis to anticipate and proactively address issues before they could lead to significant trust gaps. This ongoing focus on trust-building can eventually earn trust equity to aid the organisation when/if negative trust events occur.

Following these steps, organisations can be in a position to make trust a strategic asset rather than a potential risk should problems arise. However challenging managing trust may be, it is an effort worth taking if organisations are to continue to meet their strategic objectives and serve the needs of a growing list of stakeholders in an increasingly complex world.

Deloitte Future of Trust

Trust is the basis for connection. It is built moment by moment, decision by decision, action by action. In an organisation, Trust is an ongoing relationship between an entity and its varying stakeholders. When performed with a high degree of competence and the right intent, an organisation’s actions earn Trust with these groups. Trust distinguishes and elevates your business, connecting you with the common good. Put trust at the forefront of your planning, strategy and purpose; and your customers will put Trust in you. At Deloitte, we’ve made Trust tangible—helping our clients measure, manage and maximise it at every opportunity.

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