Trustworthiness, trust and the Edelman Trust Barometer
Lots of talk about trust this week ahead of Edelman Trust Barometer launched today at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Here’s my quick attempt at exploring the issues one at a time, as they are all getting rather unhelpfully conflated, and I think they are distinct.
The discussions also illuminate how complicated trust is; how difficult it is to pick apart what contributes to being trusted and the perception and reality of being trustworthy.
There appear to be a series of interesting issues. I am going to focus in this article on Edelman themselves and post another on the Barometer.
Part A
- Is Edelman a trustworthy organisation?
- Are they even ‘experts’ on trust and competent at offering advice on trust?
- How does one’s knowledge and perception of 1 affect 2?
Part B to come.
- Is the Edelman Trust Barometer a legitimate piece of research? Is it even about trust or is it about reputation, the state of the world, an unreliable self-serving business generator, or something else?
- How does knowledge and perception of 1, 2 and 4 affect the credibility and usefulness of the Barometer?
- Does the WEF have a role in trust and distrust of the Barometer?
1. Is Edelman a trustworthy organisation?
Let’s use Edelman’s own scale of trust here, which is a scale of Competence — “is it good at what it does” and Ethical Perception, chart below and page 60 on this year’s Barometer report.
This is OK, and better than some trust metrics and not as bad as I thought. But it is missing two areas which are high in my findings on the drivers of trust — the intent behind the actions and openness and transparency.
I will focus on ethical perception with observations on competence observed alongside. I have swapped them around, you will see why.
Articles like this one in the Guardian are useful in giving us knowledge to help inform this decision. (Of course some will consider the Guardian not to be a trustworthy source themselves, but links show other sources do support their main allegations).
Vision
Edelman do appear to have a strong vision for business as social actors and their place in supporting that. Their own website has lots about their aspirations and how business should take a lead on social issues in the Trust Barometer. They may even be ‘effective agents of positive change’ in this regard through the Trust Barometer and their work with companies, highlighting the importance of business responsibility and positive interventions on social issues. (Whether you trust or distrust them for this is another matter!)
However, through their work for organisations such as the Saudi Government, Purdue Pharma and Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, the National Mining Association and the American Petroleum Institution they could easily have undermined positive change in the important areas of the opioid crisis, human rights and climate change.
Under pressure from activists they announced in 2015 they would no longer work for climate deniers or coal producers, including the API which at one point was worth 10% of their international income. Is this a genuine attempt to move with the times, and walk their own talk, earn trust, or just an example of ‘trustwashing’?
Honest
Our perception and the reality of their honesty and integrity is tainted by their work for these clients, justaposed with their claims to be experts in trust and a socially responsible business. Can one even work, for example, for the Saudi government without being dishonest, corrupt and failing to uphold their stated values and vision?
At the heart of distrust is the perceptions with evidence, that an organisation has been saying one thing and doing another. Edelman, like many others, including many of their clients, are belatedly realising how important this mismatch is for trustworthiness and trust.
Fairness
Do Edelman ‘serve the interests of everybody equally and fairly’. Fairness is an important trust driver, and again, what you do, not what you say it the yardstick for judgement. Perhaps their recent extensive work in Saudi Arabia indicates otherwise. Especially as at almost the same time they released a special report on Geopolitics, highlighting the finding that 95% of respondents to their research said that businesses should ‘get out’ of countries with repressive governments.
This lack of alignment between what they say and what they do could be evidence that the reality is that they serve themselves and their bottom line at the expense of others. It certainly shows where red lines can be drawn when trying to balance the interests of ethics and trust against the bottom line and working on the inside to change ‘bad actors’.
Purpose-driven
Their purpose is ‘Earning Trust Through Communications’. They are a ‘global communications firm that partners with businesses and organisations to evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations.” Here is the crux of their trust problem. Does their purpose ‘to promote and protect’ their clients, override their vision for social good and commitments to ethical and trustworthy behaviour? This is at the heart of the Intent trust driver.
CEO Richard Edelman is adamant, as are many activists, ESG organisations and others, that the best way to change organisations is from the inside out. I have some sympathy with this view. It needs activism from the outside to stimulate the need to change, but having someone who is a critical friend to help embed new ways of working is more effective in making change being in denial and having insiders prop up the status quo. Are they that company, is the question?
But this purpose of trust through communications also undermines their ethical claims, especially about their competence in helping organisations earn trust. Earning trust (as this article clearly demonstrates!) is first and foremost about how you behave, and how that correlates with what you say about yourself. You cannot communicate yourself out of a behavioural problem. By promoting communications as THE solution to trust they are simultaneously undermining their reputation for competence in helping organisations earn trust.
Openness — Openness is another trust driver which is worth a mention here. Openness and initiating conversations about what they are doing, and about trade offs may at least uphold the honesty driver.
Providing ‘evidence of trustworthiness’, is important for the earning of trust. It is important for trusted organisations, but particularly essential where trust in you or your sector is suspect. This is a communications job, but it relies on communication about action. Not puff without substance.
Edelman are trying here. They have joined the United Nations Global Compact (more about trust in and trustworthiness of that another day!) and produce an annual update about its progress. This includes a human rights policy and commitments to uphold human rights. Again, what you do must stack up with your commitments.
As an aside, some communications companies propose to companies to keep their heads down, don’t make public statements and commitments because it will may backfire. It is disappointing that they are often right, so undermining both the sector and trust.
Are Edelman trusted and why?
Are they trusted is a slightly different question. (Not, ‘can they be trusted’, but ‘are they’). Trust is contextual. You don’t distrust your plumber because they can’t mend your computer.
So trusted by who, for what is the is real question.
Edelman is a PR company, and though, disappointingly, the Ipsos Veracity Index below, doesn’t include PR, I am fairly confident they will be down at the bottom with advertising execs, estate agents and government ministers!
This is because in the eyes of the general public, their intent is not focused on the public interest, but helping their clients ‘protect their brands and reputations’, which may or may not coincide with what is best for me as an individual or society as a whole.
Are they trusted by their clients? It seems that for many they are. They are a $1bn PR firm which is pretty big for the sector.
Why? Because they do a good job of communicating how they ‘protect brands and reputations’, and might be pretty good at it, even for for the dodgy, socially irresponsible ones. And because they have done a spectacular job with the Trust Barometer in becoming a household name for trust, which no-one really understands anyway, so to adapt the quote, ‘you never get fired for hiring the IBM of trust’.
Familiarity is another important driver of trust. The link to the WEF gives it credibility with this audience (and detracts from its credibility with other audiences) and, it is pretty interesting as a temperature check on what people think about businesses and governments.
Will this last though. With the growing criticism of them not walking their talk will they lose the trust of their current or potential clients. Communications will matter there for sure.
Is it too late? Can they earn it back? Not by communications alone they can’t, let’s see how their actions go! Perhaps they should look at the module of my Trustworthiness online course ‘How is trust lost and can it be regained’?
Disclosure!
I used to be in PR, for a few different companies in the 80s. I was in consumer PR, making up recipes for dubious slimming aids, promoting supermarket wine and once got my client Spillers in the Guinness Book of Records for holding the Biggest Dog’s Dinner in the World. But I didn’t think much about ethics at that point, but ‘evolved’ during the 1990’s stimulated by dissatisfaction with such pointless stuff and when the novelty of free wine wore off.
