Francis Dinha is CEO and cofounder of OpenVPN Inc., a leading enterprise network security company.
A recent study found that 61% of people no longer trust businesses or their government—across the globe. We’re living in a time where every new development seems designed to erode trust, from political misinformation and social media pile-ons to artificial intelligence that can confuse and deceive if not approached with caution. People don’t know what to believe, and they certainly don’t believe corporations. Employees, too, are forced to work in environments where trust just isn’t part of the cultural equation and cynicism only grows.
Whether you’re selling data, algorithms, subscriptions or cryptocurrencies, I guarantee none of them will last as long as you think. As we move into the future of unknowns and misleading headlines, the currency that will carry the most weight for any business is trust.
Trust From Both Sides
For business leaders, the trust we need to build goes two ways. We need to build trust with our customers, because if they don’t feel they can trust us, they certainly won’t support us. Especially if, like me, your work is in cybersecurity. But it’s not just about clients: It’s also about employees.
Time and time again, the data shows that building a culture of trust pays off. Employees who feel trusted are more productive. What’s more, 90% of executives believe that building trust in the workplace increases their bottom line. A culture of trust means letting your employees know you trust them and support them; it also means making sure they don’t feel like they’re being set up to fail.
At OpenVPN, our team is entirely remote. This is a system that, yes, has been shown many times to increase profit and productivity, but it’s important to recognize that it takes a significant degree of trust. You must choose to trust your team every day to stay on top of their work without an office to watch over them. Then again, if you can’t do that, one must wonder why you even chose to hire them in the first place.
But as leaders and managers, it can be easy to slip into a place of anxiety and mistrust. We might feel like we need to check in too much, ask too many questions or micromanage over their shoulder. Ask yourself how productive you would be if you had to manage your company in that sort of environment? How can you expect anything different from your team?
Trust Requires Truth
We’ve been living in an era of content economics, with data and content across the internet making up a huge portion of “products” being sold. The Information Age, it’s been called: information is the commodity. But I think we’ve turned a major corner when it comes to those sorts of sales. Customers are growing more suspicious, and mistrust is rampant. You don’t have to be political to see that both sides of the aisle are crying “fake news” in every direction, and the average user has no real way to distinguish fact from fiction—especially as AI grows more and more realistic.
Trust is going to be the only thing that sells as we move forward. Experts, verification, authority—these will be the only ways people will know what they’re seeing or reading is anywhere close to true or real. Anyone selling anything would do well to look to us purveyors of cybersecurity tools—trust has been our bread and butter since day one. Does anyone pay for an enterprise VPN if they don’t believe the creator is trustworthy? Our name and reputation sell more products than anything at our company, because people know they can trust us. We’ve been around the longest, we have an open-source protocol that anyone can inspect, and we’re honest, transparent and excellent at what we do. That trust is our lifeblood.
Other businesses will have to follow suit. Unless you’re a behemoth of a corporation that can operate outside the rules, you will have to build more trust with your community if you want to make it through this shift. Trust doesn’t scale automatically. You can’t automate it, you can’t outsource it and you definitely can’t fake it. You have to earn it the old-fashioned way: through transparency, consistency and respect.
Building Trust Brick By Brick
If you want to invest in your future, now is the time to focus on building trust. The only audience who will purchase from you or join your company in any capacity is the audience who trusts you, and that takes time.
I cofounded OpenVPN decades ago, and we have built out our reputation of excellence day by day, feature by feature, connection by (human) connection. It’s a process, and you can’t take shortcuts.
First, building trust means building an excellent product. That’s the most obvious baseline; if customers can’t rely on your product, your reputation will be lost instantly in our current world of online reviews and social media.
Second, building trust means protecting your users. It’s essential to have cybersecurity tools in place to protect whatever data your customers are sharing with you. This includes VPNs, segmented network security tools and zero-trust frameworks.
Third, building trust means communicating with your community effectively. Users need to feel connected to you. Real, human connection is invaluable. The ways you email, post, blog, notify or design all have an impact on how your user feels about you. Do your words make them feel welcomed? Is communication clear and open, or do you leave them guessing? Do you do what you say you’re going to do, and tell them about it in a positive way? Every step counts, just like in a real conversation with a real person; every sentence counts.
So, yes, the future will be powered by AI, automated systems and algorithms that are smart enough to anticipate what you want before you do. But the companies that rise above the noise will be the ones that remember their users are human beings, and always will be.
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