10 Social-Emotional Skills for Building Trust at Work

What are Social-Emotional Skills?

Social-emotional skills are the abilities that help people understand and manage emotions, build positive relationships, and interact effectively with others. In the workplace, they are especially valuable for managers, leaders, coaches, and anyone working as part of a team.

These skills include self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, relationship management, empathy, and effective communication.

The term Socio-emotional skills is often used also, but has a slightly different context and meaning in that it more so refers to a broader social and cultural context.

While both terms refer to understanding and managing emotions, socio-emotional skills are used to include areas such as cross-cultural communication and resilience.

Examples of social-emotional skills

Examples of social-emotional skills include empathy, active listening, emotional regulation, relationship building, collaboration, communication, conflict resolution, and teamwork.

Why Emotional Skills Matter in the Workplace

Emotional skills are invaluable for several reasons in the workplace. These skills help us to show empathy and understanding to colleagues, be better listeners, and be more supportive of each other. As a team, strong emotional skills tend to mean a reduction in conflict and better professional relationships. These skills can include emotional intelligence, listening skills, and empathy.

Why Is Trust Important in the Workplace?

Building trust at work is vital no matter what your position or status in a company.

As an individual employee, this trust will primarily be important between you and other team members, colleagues from different teams, and with your direct manager.

This trust can be important for you as an employee because it provides:

• Development – For professional and personal development, you need a manager who empowers you (which involves trust on their part) and whom you can trust to support you.
• Better well-being – because you will feel a part of the team and are able to build relationships, as opposed to suffering a lack of trust and feeling betrayed and unwanted.
• Engagement & satisfaction – If you can trust others and you feel trusted, you tend to feel more engaged and happier with your work situation.

As a manager or leader, trust impacts your:

• ability to delegate tasks effectively and to do so with confidence to your team
• confidence that tasks and projects will be completed on time and to a good level
• chance to move away from needing to monitor and control people too much, so that you can focus more on inspiring and mentoring them. This shift requires trust on both sides.

Building trust is also one of the foundations of psychological safety, where employees feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, and sharing ideas.

Trust also flows between the organization and the team, resulting in competitiveness, productivity, and the overall success of the company.

As a work team, trust helps to create:

• better communication
• a better environment for collaboration
• improved conflict resolution
• a positive work environment

Without a doubt, trust in the workplace is essential, and it greatly impacts all levels of any organization, i.e., both employees and the company itself.

So what can be done to build trust in the workplace? Whether you are an employee, manager, leader, or business owner, here are ten things you can consider doing to build trust. For more useful guides, activities, and workplace strategies, see our guides to Emotional Intelligence Training.

10 Social-Emotional Skills for Building Trust

For developing social-emotional skills for building trust in the workplace, these 10 skills are ones that you might want to focus on:

1. Support Others Privately and Publicly

This is about showing support to other people, whether it is by offering your help when they need it or by appreciating something they did.

It is important to offer support not only in private but also publicly, to show appreciation and show that you are on their side.

Providing support shows benevolence (i.e., the extent to which you act in another person’s interest and with good intentions) and respect.

2. Show Care

You can show care by asking people questions about how they are!

Being caring towards other people shows benevolence, connection, empathy, and inclusion (as you make people feel like important members of the group by caring about them).

Empathy in this context means not just recognising how others might feel but also responding appropriately and kindly.

For trainers, these empathy training activities for the workplace can help build this vital social-emotional skill in teams.

Everyone should feel included and a part of the team.

3. Empower Others

This is particularly important if you are a manager, and it means giving the opportunity to your staff to be in charge of tasks or projects without micromanaging them.

By doing this, you show others that you trust and respect them.

4. Build Relationships

In terms of social-emotional skills, the ability to build relationships is one of the most important.

Building relationships means that you are willing to make the effort to get to know other people.

You can build relationships by:

• chatting with others
• asking them questions about themselves and listening to their answers
• offering your help
• remembering their birthdays, etc.

5. Find Common Ground

Strong workplace relationships are built through trust, empathy, active listening, and regular communication.

For example, chat with other people to find out if they have hobbies in common with you, or if there is something you both like.

For instance, liking the same type of music, practicing a certain sport, or even watching the same films.

Finding common ground works in terms of creating a connection because we tend to like people who are like us.

So, if you can find something in common with different members of the team, it will help. It doesn’t mean that you have to share everything.

The other person can be very different from you, but as long as you find one thing you both share, you will start to build rapport and thus trust.

Also, finding common ground does not necessarily mean making friends with your colleagues or team members outside of work.

As long as you have something to chat about during a break, though, it will help build a professional relationship.

Finding common ground helps to break down barriers. So, for example, if you are a manager, your reports will see you, the leader, as a human and a real person, someone who is approachable.

6. Avoid Favoritism

Avoiding favorites means a far greater chance that other people will feel included.

If you care about everyone equally, for example, by investing equally in everybody’s talent, nobody will feel like an outsider.

When somebody feels like an outsider, the trust is lost because they are not connected to you.

Unfortunately, too many companies still only recognize a few talented individuals and push them up the management ladder, while ignoring everyone else.

The key is to recognize that everyone has talents. It does not mean that everyone should become a manager, but everyone’s talents should be recognized and fostered.

Showing fairness and treating everyone with respect in the workplace helps create a workplace where trust can develop naturally.

So, companies should invest in everyone’s learning and develop them for the next role.

7. Be Visible and Approachable

This is particularly important if you are a manager, and it shows your ability to connect, listen, make people feel included, and that you have empathy.

To be approachable, as a manager, you can, for example:

• implement an open-door policy
• have a positive and open attitude toward employees’ questions and concerns
• have constructive meetings with staff and listen carefully to what others have to say.

8. Support Learning and Development

This action shows respect and benevolence.

By supporting everybody’s learning and development, you show people that you care about them and appreciate their abilities.

9. Acknowledge People’s Ability to Do Their Job

This shows respect.

You can recognize people’s abilities by empowering them if you are a manager.

Also, even something as simple as saying thank you shows others that you appreciate their abilities, whatever your hierarchical relationship with them.

At an organizational level, a company can give employees extra rewards for a job well done.

Rewards do not necessarily mean extra money, but they can be anything that shows appreciation.

10. Involve Others and Seek Input

This action relates to listening, inclusion, and respect (as it shows that you respect other people’s ideas).

You can ask for other people’s input for job-related decisions, for example.

Remember, though, to listen to their input and take their opinions on board.

If you then don’t implement a person’s suggestion, make sure to clearly explain why you didn’t do so.

Otherwise, other people might think that their opinion doesn’t carry any weight and that they are being just asked out of courtesy.

Such an outcome would be detrimental to trust-building.

Social-Emotional Skills Teaching & Training Materials Options

Interested in more Emotional Intelligence training resources?

Within the area of social-emotional skills, we provide training on the following with training materials that you can download and use for teaching these topics to managers, employees or college students:

• Emotional Intelligence
• Psychological Safety
• Inclusive Leadership
• Trust Building

If you’re looking for ready-to-use Building Trust in the Workplace training materials, our editable trainer kit includes PowerPoint slides, trainer notes, participant workbook, and activities for delivering an in-house workshop.