Creating a Better Human Experience at Work Starts with Trust

What if managers and leaders at companies focused on a new goal: to elevate the human experience? This paradigm shift is something Amelia Dunlop, chief experience officer at Deloitte Digital, advocates for. She and her team have worked hard to measure the amount of humanity in the workplace—a measurement that often depends on how much trust exists between workers and leaders. Dunlop’s team focused on four signals of trust that leaders can track: capability, reliability, humanity, and transparency. Using these four measurements, which make up Deloitte’s HX TrustID solution, the team was able to predict future behaviors with high accuracy. It can appear far-fetched to measure seemingly intangible concepts with hard data, and Dunlop acknowledges that many remain skeptical about her use of the word “love” when it comes to work. “There was part of me that wanted to be deliberately provocative, to say that there is, in fact, a role for love in the workplace. And the way it connects is that worth can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. So, there's an extrinsic measures of worth, such as titles and promotions, how much someone is paid, or who has the awesome corner office. Intrinsic worth is much more about how you feel before you give a presentation, or before you get a job promotion. And do you feel like you are ‘enough’ in a workplace that's constantly evaluating you?” Especially post-pandemic, Dunlop argues that workers and leaders need to embrace this kind of love and worth so that companies can move into the future successfully. “There's something about humanizing leadership that I've been thinking a lot about. When we, as leaders, are willing to make ourselves vulnerable, to show up authentically, drop the professional masks we all wear, be transparent, demonstrate that we care—these are all signals that foster trust.”