Summary: The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a fractured world shifting from polarisation to insularity – a reluctance to trust anyone who is different. Employers can serve as powerful trust brokers, but three leadership norms stand in the way: valuing tasks over relationships, top-down control by managers, and reward systems that ignore relational work.
The story from the 28 countries in the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reinforces a sense that troubles many of us: the world is, if not yet broken, then at least worryingly fractured.
Edelman’s report charts a shift from now familiar polarisation – a belief that society is divided – to, in 2026, insularity – a reluctance to trust anyone who is different.
Whilst there is no simple answer, many thoughtful people may feel a burden to take action. What role can HR play in building a workplace where trust animates collaboration, and where colleagues in turn help society to heal?
Trust building is complex, and organisations struggle to turn ambitions into performance. The three shifts in leadership thinking and practice recommended in this article will enable you, as an HR professional, to help your colleagues move beyond rhetoric.
Essence of trust brokering
The Barometer advises ‘trust brokering’ as a way to facilitate trust between distrusting groups. Whilst governments, institutions, social media and businesses can all serve as trust brokers, employers are positioned to have especial impact.
What is the essence of this trust brokering? In the workplace, trust is largely a question of relationships: that is, how individuals and groups think of, feel about and interact with each other. Trust brokering serves to make these human connections better.
Three barriers to trust and collaboration
Mention ‘relationships’ at work and we immediately find ourselves on difficult terrain. The duty to broker trust calls for an investment that may be novel, and likely not easy, for the organisation, managers and team members alike.
HR professionals can question three common leadership assumptions that dictate what people do and how they interact. All three norms are barriers to the flourishing of trust.
1. We value tasks over relationships
In my work supporting individuals and teams to bring collaboration to life, we often uncover a longstanding commitment to functional performance. With modern roots in the Industrial Revolution and the mechanisation of labour, this norm prevails at the cost of human connection.
Whilst functional skills – in, say, IT, marketing, or HR – may land you a job, they will not make you brilliant at what you do. You can be reliably competent and yet fail to secure the outcomes that matter most.
Consider the skilled IT developer always glued to a screen, versus another who walks the floor to learn why customer service jobs are so hard. Or a tickbox-driven compliance officer versus his colleague who asks how she might help teams close more deals.
You may know the boss who, from the next desk, emails about your third missed deadline, in contrast to a previous manager who took you for coffee and gently enquired how things were at home.
This work beyond the call of duty helps us ‘see’ others, eases collaboration and improves outcomes. The first step in facilitating trust, then, is for you to encourage colleagues to value relational performance as well as the ‘day job’.
Practical questions
Here are two questions that any employee can ask, no matter their role or rank:
- How can I make it easier for you to work with me?
- What is your view / recommendation on this question?
2. Managers believe they have control
To develop relational capacities, everyone must question a second norm of culture: top-down control by managers.
In a bureaucracy, managers set goals, surveil performance and administer rewards and penalties. Consistent with a transactional employer-employee contract, this system compels team members to meet their functional duties to a ‘good enough’ degree.
But this level of bureaucracy harms intrinsic motivation and lowers enthusiasm to perform beyond the basics of a job. You can ‘manage’ a service agent to answer the phone, but not to care about her customers.
What managers can do is create conditions whereby team members talk and work together, solve problems in tandem, understand each other’s needs, and discover common ground.
For many managers, this stepping back raises questions about identity and status; they struggle to let go. As an HR professional, your role here is to provide support at individual and team levels to take care of both personal and group concerns.
Practical strategies
Two strategies help managers temper their enthusiasm to control situations (and people) and create the conditions for trust building:
- Agree the why; let team members collaborate on what and how.
- Allow time for everyone to talk through how relations could help performance.
3. We reward what matters less
With trust building, a third unhelpful norm relates to how employees are recognised and rewarded, which today is lopsided. In a culture where functional performance is valued and managers wield control over tasks, relational work is overlooked.
Investments of time, budget and other resources are rarely made, creating a vicious circle – team members gravitate toward transactional exchanges to ‘get the job done’. When colleagues become a means to the organisation’s functional ends, trust is harmed.
As managers create conditions for relational performance to thrive, the organisation, teams and individuals must appreciate everyone’s effort. It is crucial to take human connections not as ‘going the extra mile’, but as core to the job, as both a means and an end.
Practical activities
To begin, you do not need a costly change programme, but rather simple steps to acknowledge trust building. HR is well-placed to encourage two activities:
- Show gratitude for colleagues’ efforts to collaborate.
- Celebrate successes across workplace silos.
Over time, you can assess relational performance formally, within appraisal systems and pay strategies, alongside functional work.
Key takeaways
- Workplace trust matters: As society becomes more fractured, employers have a unique chance to help people build trust across their differences.
- Relational performance is key: For two centuries, the emphasis has been on functional work; today, how people relate to each other shapes experiences and outcomes.
- Managers must let go: Longstanding systems of bureaucracy are no one’s friend; managers have more impact when they shape conditions rather than control work.
- Reward efforts to connect: Many compensation systems are skewed toward functional input; organisations must recognise and reward investments in relationships.
Your next read: Edelman Trust Barometer 2026: 70% retreat into insularity
