Ethics and competence: people turn to companies

Topics

Trust is a positive feeling, granted to oneself or to others by virtue of competence and affinity with one’s goals and values. An instinctive or thoughtful evaluation, through which bonds are created. Trust is a founding feature of relationships, and every crisis of this affinity can find an answer in truth. The simplest solutions are always the best, because they go straight to the heart of the matter and, speaking of trust, the key element is adherence between facts and words, sharing results for common needs.

At the beginning of 2021, trust is one of the rarest currencies on a global scale; Edelman highlights this with its twenty-first planetary survey on the affinity between the populations of the five continents and public and private institutions: governments, media, NGOs and companies.
The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer finds as trust is at an all-time low, and what people are looking for can be summed up in a word, truth, in the logic of choosing the emergencies to deal with and in information. On a representative sample of the world population, Edelman has been carrying out annual surveys on people’s trust since 2001. Every year a new evidence, a reference, a value or an emergency become helm of public opinion for the judgment of the institutions. 2001 was the year of NGOs influence; in 2007, companies outperformed governments and media in terms of credibility; from 2014 on, new values began to cause mistrust of institutions lacking in competence or deaf to new social demands.

The 2021 Trust Barometer defines the reasons behind the unprecedented decline in trust in institutions, identifying solutions and framing another pandemic, contextual to Covid-19: that of information hygiene. In the present framework, only companies are able to collect positive judgments in both the parameters of ethics and competence; and given the lack of institutional references, citizens turn to them to drive the future into the expected challenges, operating with a long-term perspective and with a different approach to the concept of “profit”.

The third decade of the millennium was born under the sign of four shocks capable of crossing the entire globe and updating the values of trust: the health emergency caused by Covid-19, the global economic crisis, the rebellions against systemic racism, the widespread political instability. Faced with historical facts, there are three social evidences found: an epidemic of disinformation, mistrust of social institutions as of leaders around the world.
The first six months of the year 2020 have been a bell jar for governments. The first response to the Covid emergency has seen a generalized growth in trust indicators, except then getting back to precipitate during the second half of the year. On a scale of 1 to 100, trust shows everywhere a negative score: governments -8; media -6; NGOs -6; companies -3.
Trust is therefore detected through two types of attributes: ethics and competence. On the horizontal axis of the Cartesian plane we can find competence, measured through indices going from -50 to +50. Only companies, whose score stands at +14, have a positive sign. Following: NGOs -5, media -19, governments -34. On the vertical axis, ethics moves from -35 to +35. NGOs, with +16, and companies, with +5, are the only positive ones; in negative, media with -3 and governments with -10, as also happens on the horizontal axis.

If the acknowledgement of a greater competence is reserved for business institutions, their credit regarding ethics is more recent. This position has been determined, in the last year, by the results achieved by companies regarding the protection of quality information, the use of sustainable practices, the response to safety and health during the pandemic, the action of driving economy towards prosperity and the capability of long-term thinking, beyond short-term profits.
Thus, citizens ask companies what was expected from governments and media: 86 percent of respondents expect public interventions from CEOs on the impact of Covid-19, on work automation, on social and community problems. An attentiveness also on transversal fields is credited and required to the business area of the planet, with a view to a broader vision for the concept of “profit”. For 68 percent of the sample, CEOs should intervene on social issues when governments are in hiding; for 66 per cent they should lead the change; 65 percent think that they should be accountable to consumers, and not exclusively to boards or stakeholders. The way to the credibility of companies is indicated by the requests collected: taking responsibility for the quality of information, ensuring reliable data for employees and, consequently, for the community.

The collapse of information represents an important chapter of the report, within which the core issue is precisely that of hygiene – and therefore, of dirt. Trust in the media is at record lows, below the 60 100 threshold for all four protagonists investigated: search engines (56), traditional media (53), owned media (41) and social networks (35). For 59 percent of the population, journalists mislead through false/ incomplete information or exaggerations; the same percentage defines media as “not credible”, due to excessive ideology or support to a specific political position. The strongest negative opinion on the work of the media comes, in order, from Japan, South Korea, Colombia, Argentina, Italy and Spain. At the same time, due to an exaggerated amount of media content, the capability to get informed is undermined by the superficiality of the verification, the rapidity of dissemination of any news and by the quality of the debate. Information hygiene has been calculated on four criteria: the frequency of the engagement through which people keep themselves informed and by means of which channels; how often and which way do people approach different points of view; the quality of the information verification and the concept of “integrity of the source”; the tendency of forwarding content without having checked its veracity or having verified its original source. The report evaluated the satisfaction of the four elements, judging the profiles that satisfied at least 3 points as good, moderate for 2 out of 4 points and poor for those satisfying, at most, only one point. Thus, 39 percent obtained a poor information hygiene, 35 percent a moderate one, only 26 percent a good one.

The path of trust is made up of truth, and this emerges from the results of the institutions walking down this road. The scenario is determined by observing the quality of the respondents’ reactions to the management of events of global interest, emergencies, betrayed expectations, in order to highlight the reason for the dissolution of this affinity and, at the same time, in order to point out what is missing. In continuing their business, companies are called upon to embrace other expectations and to promote meaningful actions, after having achieved them. Social leaders must represent concrete examples and act with empathy, in facing people’s fears. Each institution must converge on a common purpose, collaborate and disseminate truthful, impartial and, in a word, trustworthy information.

www.edelman.com/trust