Trust

Lee Wenyong & Co. have been featured in The Straits Times in the Home section, & in STJobs.sg. If you read the article, you’d think, wow, why do the company’s executives trust in their employees so wholeheartedly?

The evolution of companies proves that a unique few have an inbuilt capacity to grow to high levels of profitability per employee, while others struggle to even survive. 

Companies are remarkably complex, & it is clear that one of the most important causes of success, when it does happen, is a high level of trust in the company. 

Trust has 2 forms: relational trust, & system trust. 

Relational trust develops between employees who come to know each other, building bonds of reciprocal dependence. 

System trust develops when a company creates a stable institution where employees come to rely upon & to believe in, such as honest accounting, good administration,  respectable governance, reliable information & universal standards like standardised operating procedures. 

Of the 2, system trust tends to be stronger & more extensive, when it is inspired by leaders who create it because there is a need for facilitating exchange & sharing. This leads to a culture where it is adopted by all employees. 

To grow, companies need to have employees imbued with a sense of ownership, so that act in the public interest in either introducing forms of revenue generation, or sustaining those that exist. 

When a company is fragmented culturally, this process is handicapped primarily due to conflicting KPIs &/or increasing levels of distrust. 

In stark contrast, where system trust is strong, it supports the sharing of information & doing business with employees you do not yet know, through providing reliable information & by underwriting risk through systems of internal codes of conduct. 

The articles describe how Lee Wenyong & Co. allows employees to pursue their personal passions at the workplace, to boost productivity, maximize creativity, ensuring retention of high performers.  

Managers at Lee Wenyong & Co. manage outcomes, not behaviours. 

What Lee Wenyong & Co. practices is a prime example of how work has become such a big part of our lives, that all employees need to strike a balance. 

Since people spend so much time at work, there's no harm injecting leisure at work. It is about employers learning to trust their high performing employees.

With trust, whether relational &/or system, a lot can be achieved.