The workplace trust gap: what employee behaviour can reveal

Article Summary

• Why behavioural evidence should sit alongside leadership confidence when assessing trust at work
• How covering behaviours drain energy, slow decisions and weaken organisational learning
• What leaders and HR teams can do to build everyday trust

Trust has become one of the most valuable currencies in business.

At a time when confidence in institutions is fragile organisations increasingly understand that trust is central to performance, engagement and long-term resilience. PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey found that 93% of business executives agree the ability to build and maintain trust improves the bottom line while 95% believe organisations have a responsibility to build trust.

Yet leaders often believe trust is stronger than employees say it is. PwC found that 86% of business executives think employee trust is high, compared with 67% of employees who say they highly trust their employer. This perception gap suggests many organisations may be managing trust through assumption, sentiment or partial measures rather than through a clear understanding of how trust is experienced.

Investors in People’s The Trust Paradox research takes this one step further. It suggests that evidence about trust sits not only in what people say they believe but also in the behaviours they report. While 82% of HR leaders believe employees are completely or mostly trusted to use their judgement, 61% of employees say they cover themselves at work at least occasionally. These findings measure different aspects of working life but together they raise an important question: why do defensive behaviours remain so common when organisations believe employees have considerable autonomy?

Together these findings point to a tension between organisational confidence in trust and aspects of employees’ everyday experience. It was a tension IIP CEO Katherine Chapman returned to in her opening keynote at the 2026 Make Work Better Conference: if organisations believe trust is strong what can people’s everyday behaviour tell us that a headline trust score may miss?

Covering yourself is rarely neutral. It takes time, absorbs energy and changes how people communicate. An employee who keeps extra email trails, delays a decision until approval is formally recorded or quietly fixes a problem before anyone senior becomes aware of it is making a calculation about risk. They may still say trust matters but their behaviour adds another layer to the story and may indicate that, in certain situations, they are uncertain about how risk, blame or accountability will be handled.

This is why trust needs to be measured through the realities of work, not only through stated confidence or general sentiment. Employees learn whether trust is real from ordinary moments: how mistakes are handled, how decisions are explained and how managers respond under pressure. Over time these experiences become the culture people work within.

Why employees cover themselves at work

Covering behaviours are sometimes treated as cynicism, bureaucracy or weak accountability but in many cases they are about self-protection. People may cover themselves because they believe the risk is too high. They may have seen mistakes handled badly before or be unsure how a decision will be interpreted later, especially if priorities are shifting or accountability is unclear. Sometimes the stated values say one thing while the informal rules of the organisation say another. In this kind of environment keeping an extra email trail or delaying a decision can feel entirely rational.

This is a business issue because much of the work that improves performance depends on people taking small interpersonal risks. A team member needs to feel able to say a deadline is unrealistic before quality suffers. A manager needs to acknowledge uncertainty before a poor decision becomes embedded. When people feel exposed these conversations happen later, become more guarded or disappear altogether.

These are moments in which psychological safety matters. People are assessing whether it is safe to take an interpersonal risk in the group. Their decision may also be influenced by trust in a particular manager or by their wider confidence in the organisation.

If employees are covering themselves the organisation may be losing access to early warnings, honest feedback and useful challenge. Decisions slow, communication becomes harder and problems surface later because people first try to manage their own exposure.

The potential performance cost of defensive working

Defensive work can absorb energy that might otherwise go into improving the work, serving customers or solving problems. When asked how they would respond if trust were low employees most commonly anticipated protecting themselves, limiting their effort, looking for another job or avoiding risk.

These anticipated responses make trust relevant to performance because they concern accountability, initiative, ownership and whether problems surface early. It also affects whether employees use their judgement or wait for permission, even when leaders say they want greater autonomy.

Why trust may look stronger from the centre

HR leaders often put in place the surveys, values, employee voice channels, performance frameworks and communication plans intended to support trust. Employees judge trust through what happens day to day.

This helps explain why trust can look stronger from the centre than it feels in the team. Senior leaders set the tone yet line managers often determine whether people feel able to be open in practice. A value around openness can be weakened quickly by a manager who reacts defensively to challenge or treats mistakes as personal failure. It can also be strengthened through ordinary working relationships when managers listen properly, explain decisions clearly and follow through on concerns.

Trust expert Veronica Hope Hailey says trust goes beyond individual leadership behaviour.

Leadership behaviour matters but an organisation also has to demonstrate trustworthiness in the way it organises itself.

In practice this means HR policies, performance systems, decision-making processes and technologies such as AI all need to feel fair, transparent and consistent. Employees need relational trust in managers and institutional trust in the systems shaping their working lives.

Hope Hailey explored this question of organisational trustworthiness further at Make Work Better in her session, The Trust Reset: Rebuilding Confidence in Leadership and HR.

What trust in practice looks like

Trust is the foundation of business performance. In the We invest in people framework trust shows up in some very practical parts of working life. In the Leading principle trust is linked to clarity of purpose, regular two-way communication and consistent trust across the organisation. The framework also connects trust to empowering and involving people, including access to information, involvement in decisions and support to make decisions in line with responsibility.

This is where trust becomes visible. People understand what is expected of them and how their role contributes to organisational goals. They have enough information to make sensible decisions and know where authority sits. They can ask questions without being made to feel difficult. They can admit mistakes early because the first response is focused on learning and resolution.

Trust is also visible in follow-through. Employees asked for feedback need to see what happens next. Every suggestion does not need to be accepted yet people need evidence that leaders have listened, considered the implications and explained the outcome. Without this loop employee voice can deepen mistrust because it raises expectations and leaves people guessing.

How leaders can close the workplace trust gap

Closing the trust gap starts with treating behaviour as evidence. If employees are covering themselves leaders need to ask what those behaviours are protecting them from. The answer may sit in management habits, unclear decision rights, inconsistent communication, poorly handled mistakes or a lack of visible follow-through.

Trust also needs to be measured beyond sentiment. Surveys show whether people feel trusted in general but behaviour shows what happens when work becomes difficult.

Leadership checklist: are your people trusted in practice?

• Behaviour: Do employees raise issues early or do problems usually surface only once they have escalated?
• Communication: Do leaders explain the reasoning behind decisions clearly enough for people to act with confidence?
• Feedback: When employees are asked for their views do they hear what happened as a result?
• Mistakes: Are mistakes discussed as opportunities to learn and improve or do people feel exposed when something goes wrong?
• Management: Are line managers equipped to respond calmly and constructively to challenge, uncertainty and poor performance?
• Autonomy: Do people have the information and authority they need to make decisions within their role?
• Performance: Are objectives clear enough for people to take ownership without constantly seeking permission?
• Evidence: Are leaders measuring trust through everyday behaviours as well as survey responses?

The workplace trust gap is a warning sign for leaders. When HR leaders report high confidence in employee autonomy while employees also report defensive behaviours then organisations have reason to look more closely at how trust is experienced.

Trust grows or weakens in everyday working moments. These moments tell people whether openness is safe and accountability is fair. For organisations the task is to make trust visible through clear communication, consistent management behaviour, fair systems and meaningful follow-through. When people spend less time protecting themselves they have more time and attention for their work. This is where trust begins to shape performance as a practical condition for better work.

Related conference session: Katherine Chapman’s opening keynote from the 2026 Make Work Better Conference.

Sources

• PwC Trust Survey 2024 — pwc.com/us/en/library/trust-in-business-survey.html