Longtime readers will recall that I wrote the following in June:

Trust building activities may register high on the radar screens of the organizations Winning Workplaces [has honored], but on the whole among the roughly 27 million small businesses across the U.S., they do not.  These and other human capital strategies are considered by many leaders to be "soft," and therefore, in a down economy, not worth leadership's time and energy compared with other areas of the business.

Maybe the results of Deloitte's latest Ethics & Workplace Survey will change some minds regarding the ROI of building trust in the workplace.  Surveying more than 700 employed Americans in April, Deloitte found that close to half have lost trust in their employer since the start of the recession; this has propelled more than a third of respondents to look for a new job as the economy picks up.

Certainly, some leaders are hip to and worried about these trends; those who run our Top Small Company Workplaces are among them.  As Management-Issues notes today, the same survey from Deloitte found that

Two-thirds of Fortune 1000 executives who are concerned employees will be job hunting in the coming months acknowledge that trust will be a factor in any increase in voluntary turnover....

The results of this survey make me wonder how much lower the percentage of employees looking to bolt would be if more companies had tried to share the pain in the midst of the worst of this recession, instead of pulling the layoff trigger first.  I also wonder – and maybe future studies will put some quantifiable data behind this – how much more revenue small and other businesses that did not view worker trust as a priority during the apex of the crisis might have right now.  The answer to this question has larger implications, including on our current GDP level and jobless rate.

Related: In April I profiled six small businesses in our network that turned to employee furloughs and pay cuts instead of layoffs to weather tough times, and came out stronger for their decision.  Read their stories here.