TRUST Keynotes & Programs Designed Especially for SHRM Chapters
The following programs and keynotes are based on Dr. Yoram Solomon's research work, keynotes, workshops, and a masterclass in the area of trust, but were adapted to be suitable as keynotes and programs for SHRM chapters.
Yoram believes that trust is best handled by HR professionals because:
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Trust is related to the skills, training, and experience that HR professionals already have
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They already know the people, the culture, and the dynamics in the organization, much better than an outsider
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They are already part of the organization, and it is a lot more economical to use them than to bring an outsider
SHRM Offerings (Click or Scroll Down):
Note that since Dr. Solomon has several keynotes, multiple breakout session topics, short and long workshops, you can book him to deliver more than one type of session in your conference. For example: a keynote + pre-conference workshop, a keynote + breakout session + post-conference workshop, etc.
Why TRUST is Important to Your Organization
Employees experience:
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74% less stress
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106% more energy
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60% more joy at work
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56% higher job satisfaction
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76% higher engagement
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50% more likely to stay another year
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70% more aligned with the company
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41% higher sense of accomplishment
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88% more likely to recommend this place to family and friends
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40% less burnout
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13% fewer sick days
Organizational Behavior and Culture:
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67% higher autonomy
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71% greater ability to hold constructive disagreement
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240% greater willingness to vulnerability
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106% greater willingness to give feedback
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76% higher receptivity to feedback
Organizational Outcomes:
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64% more productive and innovative
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29.6% price premiums
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Projects finish 45% more on time and budget
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286% higher shareholder return
Yoram's Articles Published in HR.com
A Few Hard Truths about Employee Engagement Surveys
(March 2023)
Pay Transparency: Should You Keep Your Salary A Secret?
(November 2022)
Can You Trust Remote Employees?
(February 2023)
Your 2023 Challenge: Form a New Trust Habit
(December 2022)
The Cost of our Obsession with Leadership
(January 2023)
4 Approaches To Building Employee Trustworthiness
(September 2022)
Trust And Following Or Breaking The Rules
(April 2022)
HR-Specific Keynotes
Why a Keynote and not a Breakout Session?
The keynote topics here were adapted especially for SHRM and SHRM-affiliated conference keynotes because they:
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Are very specific to the Human Resources function in the organization more than to any other function
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Address "big" HR issues rather than specific skills and tools given in focused breakout sessions
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Are inspiring and help conference attendees "open their minds" to the sessions that follow
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Are controversial, counter-intuitive, and will challenge current thinking
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Will make conference attendees think about them long after the keynote (and conference) are over
Yoram's Style
Yoram's keynotes are a rare combination of:
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Funny, but would sometimes give you goosebumps (the first time you laugh happens before he even gets on stage
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Authentic: he is known to be a no-BS speaker. He is vulnerable on stage, but will also tell you what you need to hear, and not what he thinks will make you happy
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Engaging: he reached out to the audience and engages them in the keynote
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Research-based: he conducted a lot of primary research himself, but also includes research done by others
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In simple terms: he does not speak in acronyms, jargon, or in an academic way. He makes the concepts very simple to understand for any audience. He never speaks "over their heads."
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Challenges how you think and what you know: he is controversial, contradictory, and challenges the way you think. Participants often said that he made them think long after the session was over
HR-Specific Keynote Topics
The Cost of our Obsession with Leadership
Almost two decades ago, Yoram sat with an organizational psychologist and asked, “am I a leader or an individual contributor?” The answer changed his professional life forever. Corporate America is obsessed with leadership. Everybody wants to rise in the organizational hierarchy, and we encourage it. But there is a cost for it. In this keynote, in an engaging, inspiring, sometimes humorous and sometimes emotional, Dr. Yoram Solomon will explain why we are so obsessed with leadership, how it devastates trust in the organization, why not everybody should be a leader, and how to get there.
(January 2023)
Why don't they Trust HR? How can we Change That?
A 2018 survey of 11,894 employees indicated that 70% don’t trust HR, while only 26% did. Given that one of the roles of the HR department is to build trust, and that the HR professional is the person with whom employees need to feel comfortable sharing their most pressing, urgent, personal issues, this is unacceptable. But why does it happen? You, the HR professional, are caught between a rock and a hard place. As much as you must protect and help the employees with their HR-related issues, with 2.3% of the U.S. GDP spent on civil litigation, you also must protect the company from HR-related litigation. To be able to do both well, you must be trusted by both the company’s management and the employees. Is this even possible? Using his extensive research of trust, Dr. Yoram Solomon will apply his 8 laws of trust and 6 components of his relative trustworthiness model to show you that it can be done, and how.
Can You Trust Remote Employees?
We didn’t ask for the COVID-19 pandemic. We didn’t ask to work from home. But, in March 2020, it was forced upon us. At the time, it didn’t look like there was going to be an end, and this was going to be “the new normal.” We are now out of the pandemic. Many companies have returned to work at the office, but we also learned the benefits of working from home for the company and its employees. Should we go back to the office full-time? Should we work remotely full-time? Should we deploy a hybrid mode? And, in the context of this session, should you trust employees who work from home? Or, even better, what can you do so you can trust them?
How Leaders Kill Trust
No leader intentionally wants to kill the trustworthiness of their people. But they do it anyway, and often for what they believe are justified reasons. Nevertheless, the outcome is the same: they cause their people to give up and stop being trustworthy, and as a result, the leaders cannot trust them. A self-fulfilling prophecy. This keynote will explain WHY it happens in light of the 8 laws of trust and the 6 components of trustworthiness. It will discuss the correlation between autonomy, micromanagement, and creativity (with insights from the speaker’s doctoral research) and the reciprocal relationship between trust, trustworthiness, autonomy, and micromanagement (through learnings from later research done by the speaker). These insights might shock you, but also open your eyes. At the end, he will show you how to reverse this trend.
How Pay Transparency Increases Trust, and Much More
Should employees talk about their salaries with coworkers? Is it OK to discuss salary? A survey shows that 42% of Gen-Z employees will share salary information with a coworker (compared to 19% of Baby Boomers). Another survey shows that 63% of employees prefer to work at a company that discloses pay information, but only 19% of the companies do that. For generations we were used to not share salary information with coworkers. But did you know that it has an adverse effect on trust, and not only the trust that employees have in their companies, but also the trust they have in each other? Not to mention that under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, it is illegal for an employer to prohibit employees from discussing their wages. In this keynote, the speaker will will answer a few questions: can you keep salaries a secret? And more importantly: what does it do to trust? Finally, he will discuss how pay secrecy negatively affects trust, but also the benefits of pay transparency to trust as well as equity.
(November 2022)
Why HR Professionals are Ideally Positioned to Build Trust
The benefits of a high-trust organization are tremendous: employees are 74% less stressed, 40% less burnt out, take 13% fewer sick days, and at the same time are 106% more energized, 76% more engaged, experience 60% more joy at work, 56% higher job satisfaction, and are 50% more likely to stay with the company at least one more year. Those all fall within the interests and focus of the HR professional (see blue box above for more statistics). But how do you build trust? Building trust starts by employees forming new habits that change behaviors, build their trustworthiness, the trust of others in them, and transform the organization. This keynote will explain the process, but will also emphasize why the HR professionals are at the best position to help employees form those habits: they are trained, experienced, and passionate about human skills and organizational culture; they are internal to the organization, and therefore know the people, the culture, and the dynamics; and they are already there to serve as accountability partners, a critical part in helping others form habits.
(September 2022)
May Trust be With You!
This is the more "generic" Trust keynote, and can run from 30 minutes to 90 minutes. It is customizable and can include up to four parts. The first part shows why trust is important to employees and to the company. The second part explains what trust is, and how it behaves, through the 8 laws of trust, and how people decide whether to trust you or not through the 6-component relative trustworthiness model. The third part shows a 7-step process (Trust Habits™) of forming new habits that change old behaviors that build trust and transform organizations. The last part talks about the role that HR can play in coaching others through the process. A keynote would typically include the first and second part only. An associated breakout session(s) can include other parts.
A Few Hard Truths About Employee Engagement Surveys
Employee engagement is essential to companies. It affects the company’s culture and performance. But it has also declined in the past several years. Because of that, many companies conduct employee engagement surveys. However, before you set off to conduct an employee engagement survey, there are a few things you should know and consider, because you may end up not really hearing what you need to hear, but rather only what you want to hear, and because you might do more harm than good with those surveys. This article will explain those, with examples and research data, and at the end, you’ll see what you should do to keep employee engagement high. Because, after all, that’s your goal. Right? And yes, it has everything to do with trust.
(March 2023)
HR-Specific 1-Day Program
A 2018 survey of 11,894 employees indicated that 70% don’t trust HR, while only 26% did. Given that one of the roles of the HR department is to build trust, and that the HR professional is the person with whom employees need to feel comfortable sharing their most pressing, urgent, personal issues, this is unacceptable. But why does it happen? You, the HR professional, are caught between a rock and a hard place. As much as you must protect and help the employees with their HR-related issues, with 2.3% of the U.S. GDP spent on civil litigation, you also must protect the company from HR-related litigation. To be able to do both well, you must be trusted by both the company’s management and the employees. Is this even possible? This workshop is an adaptation of the standard Trust Habit™ workshop to the specific HR profession and can be delivered in 4 to 8 hours.
The outline of the HR-adapted Trust Habit™ workshop includes:
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Pre-workshop online HR Trustworthiness assessment that participants can send to people in their organizations to fill (anonymously). An individual (and confidential) report will be provided to the participants after the second part (Education) of the workshop, and will be used to develop an individualized trustworthiness-building plan
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Part 1: Inspiration (the WHY?). In this part, participants will be engaged, inspired, and will learn (through the 8 laws of trust) that (1) trust is relative and should be assessed and addressed differently in every relationship, and (2) that the foundation for being trusted is your own trustworthiness
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Part 2: Education (the WHAT?). In this part, participants will learn how other people in their organizations (and beyond) consider whether to trust them or not, through the 6-component relative trustworthiness model (based on "who you are" and "what you do"). At the end of this part, equipped with the knowledge gained in the first two parts of the workshop, participants will be given their individual trustworthiness assessment report and learn how to interpret it.
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Part 3: Application (the HOW?). In this part, using the 7-step Trust Habits™ process, participants will develop their own individualized trustworthiness-development plan that will help them form habits that change behaviors, and build their trustworthiness (and the trust that others, employees and managers, have in them).
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Part 4 (only in a full-day workshop): Feedback. There is a reciprocal relationship between trust, giving feedback, and receiving feedback. For HR professionals, the ability to give and receive feedback is even more critical than for others. In this part, you will learn how to give feedback like you care, and take feedback like it matters.
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Part 5 (only in a full-day workshop): The habits of the most trusted people. While trust is relative, some behaviors will generally increase (or reduce) trust. This part will cover the top ones.
Pricing: Flat Fee or Revenue Sharing
While the option of a flat fee for the workshop is available to you, I wanted to help reduce your risk and offer a revenue-sharing partnership model, in which we share the income from the event, reducing your risk of the event becoming a loss for your chapter.
HR-Specific 3-Day Program
I believe that corporate HR professionals are positioned at the right time, and the right place, and are equipped with the right skills, knowledge, and experience to help build trust in the organization (see the relevant keynote above).
However, it requires additional training to reach the fourth layer of skills in the Trust Habits™ program: the ability to coach others through the process.
This requires the HR professional to:
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Identify trust issues in dependency relationships
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Diagnose the trust issues and find the root cause
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Help the employee create a Trust Habits™ plan to form new habits
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Be their accountability partner throughout the implementation of the plan
This 3-day program is designed to train corporate HR professionals not only how to become more trusted, but how to coach others and support them through the process.
Pricing: Flat Fee or Revenue Sharing
While the option of a flat fee for the workshop is available to you, I wanted to help reduce your risk and offer a revenue-sharing partnership model, in which we share the income from the event, reducing your risk of the event becoming a loss for your chapter.
About Yoram Solomon, Ph.D., MBA, LL.B.
Dr. Yoram Solomon is the author of The Book of Trust (now in 3rd edition and the most comprehensive book ever written about trust), the book series Can I Trust You?, and host of The Trust Show podcast. He published a total of 16 books and more than 300 articles on Trust, Innovation Culture, and Entrepreneurship. Yoram holds a Ph.D. in organization and management, an MBA, a law degree, and an engineering degree. He is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship, a 2-time TEDx speaker, a former executive, elected official, pilot, and member of the Israeli 35th airborne brigade. Through his keynotes, workshops, and teaching, he is known for his no-BS style of telling you what you need to hear, and not what he thinks you want to hear.
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