It's a classic trust-building exercise, fresh from the seminars that used to make your eyes roll: fall backwards into a colleague's arms and hope they break your fall.
While the economy has made these bore-fest seminars all but disappear, the question's worth asking - would you trust your CEO to catch you?
Probably not, employees and experts say.
Trust has become a major issue in workplaces around the world as companies weather the recession. Nearly half of British workers, surveyed recently by consulting firm Endaba, say they don't trust their managers and CEOs. According to the survey of 5,114 employees from both white and blue collar companies, they think it's because managers don't care about them. The annual "Trust Barometer" issued in January and conducted by Edelman, a global PR firm, found 62 per cent of respondents worldwide have lost trust in corporations and organizations in the past year.
"Trust does tend to suffer in difficult times, partly because there are difficult decisions people have to make," says Stephen M. R. Covey, author of The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything.
The way managers make these decisions does little to buoy trust, he adds.
"They tend to be done without very much openness, without very much transparency - people in rooms all day long behind closed doors."
And when they emerge, managers dish out spin and don't give employees the straight goods, he says.
When the winds of change blow through a workplace, an employee's sense of security is always rattled a little - and more so when that change carries a potential threat, says James Gavin, the director of the professional coaching program at Concordia University in Montreal.
"Under conditions of stress, transition, trust gets challenged, and that then becomes more of a factor depending on the trustworthiness of individuals who are in charge," he says.
In workplaces fraught with ambiguity, employees try to fill in the blanks with little to go on.
Our level of trust comes down to our basic survival instincts, says Patrick Egan, managing director of consulting firm Endaba. If employees feel threatened, they'll even be more competitive with colleagues.
"They're saying 'Why would I share anything with you if I could look good if I kept this information to myself and [shared it] at the board meeting?' " he says. "When all of these other people are starting to lose their jobs, you start looking at your job and you start thinking ... I want to look better than the next person."
The raging blame campaigns over AIG bonuses and finger pointing at disgraced financial giants (not to mention the spate of boss-nappings in France) can colour an employee's view of his or her managers, Mr. Covey says.
"It kind of doesn't pass the smell test to people and so they start to question and wonder, 'Is it happening in my company?' " he says. "They see it happening in one place, they feel it's suspicious about it happening in their place. They get more frustrated especially if they don't feel like they have trust in their management."
And as employees spend time weaving conspiracy theories, productivity drops, he says.
Meantime, managers forget that trust is a two-way street.
"One of the biggest things is management doesn't trust employees," he says. "It's also in times like this that managers, leaders, bosses and companies can really differentiate themselves too. ... They can really demonstrate they do care. They can say, 'I want you to win as much as I want to win.' "
Straight up honesty and open communication are key to winning and securing trust, says Prof. Gavin.
"The common rule of thumb is one untrustworthy act negates 100 trustworthy ones," he says. "It doesn't take much to annihilate the sense of trust in an organization and it's very important for people to be clear, to be transparent as can be and to do what they say."
Employees also tend to trust their middle managers more than the CEO, says Claus Rerup, a professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business. If employees see their manager trusting the CEO, that can make them feel more secure, he says.
"I think these middle managers are people they've known for a long time, which they have bonds and have created ties with," says Prof. Rerup. "[Employees] look toward these people."
The Great Place To Work Institute's national report, issued last Monday, measures companies mainly on how much trust they foster between management and employees.
Trusted employers are transparent and honest, says managing partner Jose Tolovi Neto, and often perform better economically as well.
"Companies that work well in creating trust will be much better equipped to go through the crisis because their employees will walk the extra mile," he says.
Leslie Armstrong, 24, a junior tax accountant for Fuller Landau LLP, an accounting firm in Toronto, attends group chats run by her CEO Michael Epstein every Friday. At the sessions the CEO updates them on the company's stats and how the economy has touched the company. While she admits she and her colleagues are scared for their jobs as they look at the dreary economic forecasts, she believes management has nothing to hide.
"Just knowing the plan of where the firm is going I think helps build trust."
