Public sector trust and information bankruptcy: actions we can take
The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer (published 13 January 2021), is always an important read for all professional communicators.
But it is particularly important for global public sector communicators in central and local government, health and other agencies to gain an indication of where in-country and global trust levels are at, what society and people now expect of institutions, trust in communication and media channels and the skills now required to continue to effectively operate.
Who trusts who?
The 2021 Trust Barometer shows trust in societal leaders has declined and people stated they now place more trust in local leaders, medics, scientists. Technical and academic experts continue to rate high on the trust scale, followed by a person like yourself, a CEO and a NGO representative.
Journalists are the least trusted spokespeople, with trust in media down 2 points on the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer.
Ethics and competence also showed declines, with business rather than institutions mainly being now seen as both by those questioned for the annual report.
Action 1: Continue to use representatives from the ‘shop floor’
Professional communicators should continue to look to utilise representatives from professions to speak on behalf of our institutions and leaders, as appropriate, as we have done for many years.
Action 2: Ethics is now a growing USP for the communication profession
Purpose-driven, honest, fairness and vision are how many assess ethical and unethical perception. If just one of these is seen to be not where it should be or out of kilter with the others, we have a risk of a perception gap, that with the growing infodemic wars and with the lower trust in the channels and media, can become more difficult to mitigate and close.
We have a real opportunity to now make ethics and purpose one of our top skills and leadership drivers, supporting our organisations to do right by the audiences they serve.
Practitioners should sign up to codes of ethical conduct to ensure the highest trust in what we do by those we serve, internally and our audiences we converse with and support, and that, as part of our licence to practice, we can effectively hold those in senior positions to accounts on their decisions and actions to ensure continued trust with those we serve.
We can’t support institutions to build and maintain trust, and at a time of great complexity as well as also being in continued national and global crisis, if we cannot always prove trust in ourselves and in the strategic direction and communication design we are advising.
Information sources and information hygiene
Trust in information sources is at an all-time low globally with trust in all channels down from 2020 trust levels. Social media and owned media are the least trusted, according to the report.
Whist traditional media and search engines trust levels remained higher than those of social media owned media, they both saw the biggest drops in trust (traditional media an -8% reduction and search engines a -6% reduction to 2020 trust levels).
However, despite trust in most sectors declining, including in technology and in education, trust levels in these two sectors were still amongst the highest.
The Edelman Trust Barometer states news organisations are seen as bias, with 61% globally disclosing the media is not doing well and being objective and non-partisan.
Only one in four people stated they have good information hygiene. Good information hygiene was categorised as news engagement, avoiding information echo chambers, verifying information and not amplify unvetted information.
57% of respondents said they regularly share information they find to be interesting, with just 29% saying they practice good information hygiene. 39% per cent of people stated in all of the above categories they have poor information hygiene.
Action: PRs should become data-led and build improved media relationships
To build trust in channel messaging, across paid, earned, owned and social, communicators must be evidence-led. This should now include being data-led. Importantly, media officers must be able to switch to being data-led and confident enough in the data their organisations are presenting to hand the data sources to journalists.
As journalists become more data-led, many will not support articles without that evidence. Many journalists now prefer to be handed the raw data to tell their own stories.
Therefore, building and maintaining the best relationships with media in the UK and globally is imperative, taking into account local cultural operating conditions.
In the UK public sector, a majority of data is opensource data readily available to anyone who wants to pull it off manually or via an API (application programme interface). Many media outlets already contain automated news content pulled from public sector open data sources.
Communicators should be trusted to effectively interrogate statistical data our organisations hold, use and report on.
We should understand that citizens, organisations, media can counter our evidence with other ‘evidence’, triangulating it and it could end up being skewed and not the article or audience messaging and understanding you planned for. This poses a big reputation risk to us and our organisations. We must know our evidence and data sources, have confidence in the evidence and raise issues, reputation and trust risks, with a ‘what if’ mindset, on evidence being provided before it leaves ‘the building’.
We should continue to issue full rebuttal when evidence is not portrayed accurately or out of context.
Employers are now more believable
The highest amount of people trust communication from their employer, with 61% overall believing the information they receive after seeing it once or twice.
National government also scores highly here with 58% stating they have trust in their communication. People’s social media feeds scored the lowest with 39% stating they believe the information if they have seen it once or twice.
Action: Internal communicators should become transformational workforce engagement specialists, supporting public sector organisations to become really values-driven and high performing workforces, which are the best ambassadors externally.
Jobs
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated job loss fears with 56% stating they are concerned about automation, robots and AI.
It is imperative professional communicators continue to upskill into areas such as real data and new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
The profession globally must continue to be at the top of its game with all practitioners ensuring a robust and effective CPD plan but to always do what we do best as communicators and be strategic in approach to our upskilling.
This means putting in place our own horizon scanning strategies to ensure we are fully au fait with the shifting landscapes of the future of work, technologies being built and used in our own roles and at organisations, people behaviours shifting faster than ever before and the wider societal on-going shifts, collectively and within communities and cohorts.
Action: Upskill into real data and new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, already being used by public sector organisations in operations and in communication design and deployment.
See www.cipr.co.uk.ai for more on how you can upskill into AI.
You can find the full 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer here: 2021-edelman-trust-barometer.pdf
