Why Trust Will Lead Us To The Optimal Workplace

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across the book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, and it continues to inspire me in my entrepreneurial journey today. As the debate persists about what the new workplace should look like (as we are finally no longer forced to work remotely), I cannot help but think about one of its critical tenets: trust.

One of the organizations discussed in the book is FAVI. They are based in France and manufacture car parts. The owner, Jean François Zobrist, lives by the premise that employees are reasonable people that can be trusted to do the right thing. Another one of his principles is that “people working in an organization have to be happy, [as] this creates happy customers, and this again creates happy shareholders.”

Laloux describes how Zobrist put his principles to the test when he took over as CEO of FAVI and immediately got rid of their clock system and production norms. Before his tenure, employees had to clock in and clock out, and the hourly output of every machine was registered. Not only that but “every minute a worker showed up late for work, and any output below the hourly target, would be recorded and led to a deduction from [their] monthly paycheck.”

When he suddenly got rid of this control mechanism, his management team was nervous that productivity would collapse. But in fact, the opposite happened:

“When you operate a machine, there is an optimal physiological rhythm that is the least tiring for the body. In the old system, with the hourly targets, [employees] had always intentionally slowed down. They gave themselves some slack in case management increased the targets. For years, operators had effectively worked below their natural productivity, at a rhythm that was more tiring and less comfortable for them — and less profitable for the company. Now they simply worked at their natural rhythm.”

You can apply this lesson to deciding where (and when) your employees work. I encourage you to put your faith in them, as they know what is best to balance fulfilling their role at the company with their happiness.

Laloux summarized this concept well: “When trust is extended, it breeds responsibility in return. Emulation and peer pressure regulates the system better than hierarchy ever could. . . [W]hen organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen.”