We’ve spent this week at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition and over the next few days will be bringing you blogs covering some of the best content.

It was a really strong event with many attendees returning after a few years away the conference. The themes were definitely forward looking with the threads of future working structures and leadership challenges, ways of harnessing the opportunities offered by new technologies and challenges of engagement and delivering the customer experience running through many of the sessions.

There was also a nod to social media content generation with the press office for the first time hosting a number of HR bloggers alongside more traditional print journalists from the HR and business press.

If there was one word that kept running through the sessions that we attended it was TRUST. Specifically the need to trust your employees, and for your employees to trust each other.

It appeared in the opening keynote from Sir Terry Leahy (former CEO of Tesco), who immediately stressed the link between trust and confidence ‘collective intelligence only works if colleagues trust each other’, and whose sourcing of Tesco’s core values, quite literally from the shop floor, is a testament to the faith that he put in his workforce.

The word was probably most evident in presentations around future working and new technologies. Peter Thomson, co-author of Future Work: How Businesses Can Adapt and Thrive In The New World Of Work gave us a mnemonic for trusting employees to adapt and thrive in changing working structures:

• Trust your people, show them you care
• Reward output
• Understand the business case
• Start at the top
• Treat people as individuals

In the session on how HR can harness the power of Social Media Neil Morrison, Group HR Director for Random House, told us ‘Trust beats control hands down’ whilst Matthew Hanwell of Nokia offered a compelling reason for giving employees free reign on internal social media platforms:

‘When employees can truly say what they really think, they really do have to think about what they say before they say it’

It wasn’t only Twitter and Technology discussions that referenced Trust – it was there in panel discussions and case studies on subjects ranging from leadership to turning employees and customers into fans.

It was certainly a refreshing message and one neatly encompassed in the quote ‘treat your employees like adults and they’ll behave like adults’ which was heard in several sessions.

We’d love to hear from companies that are embracing ‘trust’ over ‘control’ – or ‘guidelines’ over ‘policy’ – and find out if the approach is paying dividends.

Let us know…and keep a lookout on this blog for future pieces covering some of the learning points from CIPD11.

Related posts:

1. Future Work : Future-proofing Your Organisation One the best attended sessions at last week’s CIPD Conference...