See how the Trust Diagnostic turns soft signals into sharp strategy.

The Trust Diagnostic measures the climate of trust within an organization and reveals whether it is operating in one of three zones:

• Trust Dividend, increasing in value and impact
• Stability Zone, the foundation to begin increasing in value and impact
• Trust Tax, decreasing in value and impact

Three core areas are measured: communication, processes, and culture. At an individual level, it reveals what each person is thinking, sensing, and feeling about the organization at that moment.

Engagement surveys focus on how employees feel about work, well-being, and performance. Culture surveys explore shared values and behaviours. The Trust Diagnostic specifically measures the level of trust at a given time, categorizing it as Stable, Increasing (Trust Dividend), or Decreasing (Trust Tax), helping leaders decide what action is needed.

Yes. The Trust Diagnostic is grounded in research that distinguishes three related but separate constructs: trustworthiness beliefs, trust itself, and trust behaviours. Rather than measuring sentiment or opinion, it assesses actual behaviours across three interdependent domains, Processes, Communication, and Culture, identified through consultation with Bjorn Ezelund, an Oslo-based organizational psychologist and trust specialist, so it captures how trust functions inside an organization, not just how it's perceived.

It's been field-tested across 60 organizations and developed by Dorothy Spence and Suki Laniado-Smith, co-creators of the Conscious Business Operating System™ (CBOS™). The diagnostic draws on our 7 Levels of Human Development and Awareness model, linking individual and organizational values to the reactive, structured, and adaptive stages that shape how a business grows.

Leaders receive a clear picture across the three domains, Processes, Communication, and Culture, along with an Overall Trust Level (Dividend, Stability Zone, or Tax) and key Insights showing exactly where trust is strong or weak.

As the first app built on the Conscious Business Operating System™, the Trust Diagnostic feeds directly into the Human Dynamics side of CBOS™. Results are interpreted with an experienced coach, who works with leaders to translate the Insights into next steps. There's no fixed, one-size-fits-all solution: final decisions rest with the organization's leaders.

Customization is not currently available.

Clearly explain why the Trust Diagnostic is being run, what the outcome could look like, how each person contributes, and what will happen with the results. All responses are completely anonymous, reports show only combined team or organizational results.

As frequently as appropriate, quarterly for some organizations, or after completing actions from the previous round.

An overall result in the Trust Tax zone, or any of the three dimensions sitting in a Trust Tax level, are the first areas to address, along with any statements flagged as a Perception Gap.

Research consistently shows a direct link between high-trust cultures and commercial performance. Companies on the 100 Best Companies to Work For list have outperformed their peers by 2 to 3 percent in annual stock returns over a 26-year period, and Paul Zak's neuroscience research (Harvard Business Review, 2017) found employees at high-trust organizations report 50 percent higher productivity, 76 percent more engagement, and 40 percent less burnout than those at low-trust organizations.

The reverse is just as measurable: organizations with weak trust conditions typically lose 5 to 10 percent of productive capacity to the quieter costs of low trust, coordination overhead, rework, unclear ownership, and decisions that take longer than they should. The diagnostic doesn't just point to this risk in the abstract. For organizations in the Trust Tax zone, results feed a performance impact model that translates your own operational metrics, decision cycle time, rework rates, escalation frequency, delivery reliability, into an estimated dollar cost of your current trust gap, and a recoverable opportunity if it closes.

There's no universal number: ROI depends on your organization's size, industry, and where you're starting from. But the pattern holds across every case we've modeled: trust conditions aren't a soft cost. They're a quantifiable one.

External benchmarking isn't available, the diagnostic's strength is internal, comparing your own results over time to track transformation and improvement.

Yes, coaches and consultants can create individual client accounts to distribute assessments, monitor responses, and share reports.

Please contact us to discuss.

A How to Guide covering the platform and reports is available to all administrators, with a virtual live training session available to Account owners.