Why Transparency Is Essential to a Trusting Staff Transparent businesses not only have more loyal employees, but better brainstorming sessions and more productivity.

Consumer spending is on the rise; the housing market is rebounding; hiring is at a five-year high. Prosperity, it would seem, is on its way back. Yet while the numbers are up, spirits are still down. That's because, despite five years of rebuilding, one essential to business success is still nowhere close to its pre-crash levels: employee trust.

"Building Trust in Business," an annual survey conducted by Boston-based Interaction Associates, has mapped sentiment in the workplace for the past half-decade. And in quantifying the long-term impact of back-patting and back-stabbing, this study has found that organizational trust has a definitive link to business performance.

"High levels of trust equals high performance," says Linda Stewart, CEO of Interaction Associates, which helps organizations build collaborative cultures. "If you look at the lower-performing companies, in all cases they had lower levels of trust."