Trust, misinformation and your organisation

Sarah Baddeley, Executive Partner at management consultancy MartinJenkins outlines what HR professionals need to be considering in their own organisations when dealing with society’s increasing lack of faith in societal institutions.

Social leadership is now a core function of business. That’s the challenge thrown out to all organisations in the most recent annual Edelman Trust Barometer, an online survey that gains insights across more than 28 countries and over 36,000 respondents. This survey is a must-read for anyone helping their organisation navigate its role and relationship to its employees, customers and community.

Edelman argues that the evidence is in and that business is the ‘last one standing’ when it comes to trust in institutions and in the information they produce or relay (My employer: The last one standing, 1 September 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic has seen levels of trust in government, media and scientists fall to an alltime low.

Questions HR practitioners should be asking

In this new context, where society is looking more and more to business to understand and address our most complex social problems, HR needs to be asking fundamental questions, including the following.

• Do we have clear positions on social issues that matter to our employees, customers and community?

• Do our values and behaviours and our systems and processes align with and support our positions on those social issues?

• Are we acting with integrity, particularly on the big social issues when it matters?

The World Economic Forum has identified societal division and loss of social cohesion as one of the top risks for the global economy.

Disinformation and social division

Addressing those questions necessarily involves engaging with the problem of misinformation and disinformation.

‘Misinformation’ is false information that may or may not have been created to deceive and cause harm to a person, organisation or community.

‘Disinformation’ is false information that was deliberately designed with the intent to deceive and cause harm.

The concepts of misinformation and disinformation are at the centre of the thinking around increasing social division; often characterised as ‘culture wars’.

The World Economic Forum has identified societal division and loss of social cohesion as one of the top risks for the global economy. The Edelman team locate both division and disinformation in an alarming picture of the cycle of distrust that threatens social stability.

Drivers of misinformation

Kate Hannah and the Disinformation Project are studying misinformation and disinformation in New Zealand, including the impact of isolation, uncertainty, anxiety and fear. This project team has been observing the effects of disinformation and misinformation in Aotearoa since February 2020 and offers valuable insights into how misinformation and disinformation operate and how they present critical challenges to New Zealand.

In his provocatively titled 2017 book How Bullshit Conquered the World, James Ball unpicked the tangled sources of misinformation by exploring the underpinning psychology, cognitive biases, profit structures and incentives and culture. Ball concludes that misinformation is a symptom, fuelled by misogyny, racism, nationalism, hyper-partisanship, distrust of government and anti-intellectualism.

Those drivers identified by Ball and the Disinformation Project are all contradictory to the goals of good human resource practice, particularly goals relating to diversity and inclusion.

Engaging with hearts and minds: A relational approach to building trust and countering misinformation

HR professionals grappled with the rise of misinformation and disinformation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly those whose workforces were subject to mandatory vaccination and other even more stringent requirements.

At MartinJenkins, we were involved with those challenges on several different fronts. At the height of the pandemic, we had staff who were part of the government response, while at the same time we were operating our own company and supporting our employees in a highly uncertain context.

I talk often about this experience with my colleague Paul Giles, our Engagement Lead at MartinJenkins. During much of the pandemic, Paul was Group Manager Communication and Engagement at the Ministry of Health. A seasoned engagement and communications leader, Paul believes that misinformation can’t be countered solely with evidence and accuracy, it also requires engaging with hearts and minds. In other words, how we communicate and the mechanisms we use to build a sense of trust are as important as what we communicate.

As Paul puts it, “As leaders we need to move from transactional to relational models of communication. It’s about who is leading and communicating and about how our systems, processes, and other elements support our values in the workplace.”

Questions HR practitioners should be asking

So, engaging hearts and minds requires us to look closely at how our organisation is seen and how we are communicating.

• Do we understand how our employees, customers and communities access information about us?

• How much trust and confidence do they have in us and in what we say?

• What mechanisms are we using to engage with them?

• How can we work with social partners, suppliers, customers and those outside our organisation to have a clear understanding of what is important to us?

Communication and misinformation in the workplace: Navigating rights and protections

Anyone who has sought to address bullying, racism or sexual harassment in the workplace knows it depends very much on the specifics and that it can involve a careful balancing act.

On the one hand, those behaviours can present risks under the Human Rights Act 1993, the Employment Relations Act 2000 or the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015. But balanced against that is the right under the Bill of Rights to seek, receive and impart information or opinions of any kind and in any form.

Those two considerations sit in obvious tension, and the tension has been making its way into our workplaces.

The resignation of Jacinda Ardern in January was a recent example of where employers found themselves having to make delicate balancing judgements. What was inherently a political event quickly morphed online into a strong misogynistic narrative.

Paul Giles and I were both surprised at how many people decided it was appropriate to share their personal opinions (including those that were inflammatory, derogatory and misogynistic) on Ardern through LinkedIn, a widely used platform for business networking where individuals’ reputations are directly connected to their employers.

For us, the episode reinforced how important it is for organisations to be clear about their positions on social issues and what they expect of their staff.

Questions HR professionals should be asking

• Do our employees clearly understand the position the organisation has taken on social issues?

• Do we have good policies that clearly set out our expectations of our employees’ conduct?

• Do we have good processes and systems in place to address poor behaviour and to prevent our organisation from getting a reputation for poor behaviour?

• Do we have relationships with people we can call on for help, particularly a good employment lawyer or other professionals who can independently review an employee’s conduct when needed?

• Have we stress-tested our policies against real-life examples?

Misinformation and exclusion: Making the links

Amanda Millar, a highly experienced journalist now with her own communications company, wrote an excellent opinion piece in March this year for Global Women on the consequences of online misogyny for democratic processes and for building diversity and inclusion. She wrote of the chilling effect it can have both on people feeling able to speak out and on women stepping into leadership roles.

Organisations will need to continue to grapple with the close links between, on the one hand, the flows of information and misinformation and, on the other, our efforts to advance diversity and inclusion, both inside our organisations and outside.

HR practitioners need to continue to look carefully at what their organisation is saying: how and where. This may also include engaging with what your employees may be saying publicly, and the messages they may be sending about your organisation to the rest of your staff, customers and community.

Paul Giles (Ngāti Kahungunu) is Engagement Lead for MartinJenkins. He is evangelical about helping organisations tell their story in everything they do and about using insights to help organisations better understand their employees and customers.

Sarah Baddeley is a Partner of management consultancy MartinJenkins. She advises government, boards and executive teams on issues relating to employment, the labour market and organisational strategy.