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Mel: It's a typical internal comms story. The CEO emails everyone, the C-suite repeat the message, and it lands in every inbox. But how many of the people on the receiving end actually trust that message? How would you know? And what can you do about it? All the research points the same way. Trust is slipping.

That includes the trust your employees have in your leaders and in your organisation's group-wide communication, and that has consequences. If people don't trust you, they will not listen to you. They certainly won't follow you, they'll resist your change efforts, and they'll probably leave some pretty terrible reviews of your business on the way out.

Trust is the foundation of any good relationship and of any person's or brand's reputation. So how can you tell if people trust your comms, and how do you build that bank of trust back up? Well, that's what today's episode is all about

Hello again, friends, and [00:01:00] welcome to episode 195 of Less Chatter, More Matter, the communications podcast. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, also known as Brisbane. And today, we are tackling a problem that's showing up in businesses of all shapes and sizes: people trust your corporate communication less and less.

The research on this is very clear. Edelman's Trust at Work 2026 study found the first statistically significant year-on-year drop in trust in my employer since August 2024. So that's how much people trust their own employers. Trust levels are still high, don't get me wrong, but they are falling. Uh, trust in my CEO dropped from 70 to 66%, trust in coworkers dropped from 82 to 73%, and trust in direct managers dropped from 79 to 72%.

So dropping trust across the board. [00:02:00] Every single one of those statistics is a record low. The study also found widespread skepticism about whether leaders are being candid about what's happening in their organisations. Gallup paints an even bleaker picture. Just 20% of US employees strongly agree that they trust their organisation's leadership.

And closer to home, PwC's Hopes and Fears survey this year, where they surveyed 1,250 Australians, found trust in top management has fallen from 61% to just 50%. So only one in two people trust top management at their business. Trust in their own manager, their direct manager, has fallen from 50% to just 41%.

And in the UK, the IC Index 2026 surveyed 5,000 workers, and they found that while 73% trust their own direct manager, only, again, one in two, 50% trust senior leadership. [00:03:00] Trust in senior leaders and CEOs is down nine points on last year. And only 54% of those people who were surveyed rate their organisation's communication as excellent, which is the sharpest single year fall that research has ever recorded So why is this happening?

Well, I see three big reasons, and the first one is the say-do gap. That's the distance between what leaders say and what em- your employees actually experience. And once people notice that gap, it becomes very hard for them to trust anything you say from then on. You see it most clearly during change and especially during redundancies.

In LiveCareer's US survey of 900 workers, 73% said they didn't trust leadership to be fully honest during financial difficulty, and 40% believe tr- leadership is never transparent at those times. That's a big chunk of people who just don't trust you at all. On [00:04:00] AI, 40% believe leadership would downplay the impact on jobs to protect the company's image.

That's pretty damning. The IC Index found fewer than half of employees, so just 49%, agree the reasons behind organisational changes are clearly communicated. That's down seven points since 2023. And most employees also don't feel their organisation is honest about the impacts of change or that it even listens to their views on it.

And when change goes badly, the damage sticks. Edelman found that after a poor transformation experience, trust in the CEO drops 33 points from 82% to 49%. That is huge. And trust in your own manager drops 25 points from 85% to 60%, and those bad experiences are not spread evenly. Associates were about three times as likely as executives to report one of those bad experiences.

49% of associates said they had a poor [00:05:00] one, compared with just 17% of executives. The second reason, and we've talked about this on the show before, is a lack of communication capability at the leadership level. So most first-time managers never get any formal training or mentoring, and we just expect them to magically know what to do from the day they become a leader, and that flows straight through to how their s- team sees them and their communication, especially if they are not creating safe spaces to ask for and get honest feedback from their team.

And there's a blind spot. Axios HQ found nearly 70% of communicators think they know what updates and information employees need, but only 31% of employees agree with that same statement. And Gartner reports that only 26% of employees trust leaders to be competent and credible, so or less than a third, and 79% have low trust in organisational change.

So that's reason [00:06:00] number two is we really do see this gap in leadership comms ca-capability. And reason number three, it's a growing one, it's AI-written comms. When people think they can spot a message written by AI, the sender loses credibility pretty quickly. A University of Florida and a USC study of 1,100 professionals found that when supervisors used high levels of AI in their messages, only 40 to 52% of employees saw them as sincere.

And for messages with low AI generation in it, the sincerity jumped to 83%. And what they found was that people are reading those heavily AI-written messages as laziness or as a sign that the person sending it just doesn't care. So to be clear, people don't mind the light touch help of AI for things like grammar and editing, but the damage came when people leaned on AI for messages that really should be very [00:07:00] personal.

So messages that are praising people, congratulating people, that are giving motivation and feedback. So that's why we lose trust. It's the say-do gap, it's that lack of capability, and it's the AI-generated messages. But why should we work to build it? Shouldn't employees just do what their leaders tell them and believe what they say?

Lol. We don't live in that world because we work with humans, not robots, for now at least. And as long as humans are your employees, you need their trust. Trust builds engagement, and engagement builds business results and a great reputation as an employer. It helps you drive change, attract and keep great people, and build a more innovative culture so you can have a better chance of beating the competition.

The list goes on and on, and trust is the linchpin in all of it. For example, Gallup found that people who trust their organisation's leadership are 3.7 times more likely to be engaged at work. And Staffbase here in Australia, last year, their study found that when employees [00:08:00] say leadership communication is very clear, they are five times as happy in their role.

So how can you tell whether people trust what you're telling them? Open rates and click-throughs are not going to give you that because people can open a message and just, quite frankly, not believe a word of it. You have to ask and then show what you did with the answers. And again, research tells us that when people have real opportunities to give honest feedback about organisational changes, they are much more likely to have confidence in those leaders to handle what comes next, which in a world which is tumultuous and uncertain is so, so important.

But the listening only counts if people see it leads somewhere. So one employee experience analysis by a organisation called Explorance found a 13-point gap between employees who said their leaders listen and those who said their leaders explain what they did with their feedback. So that gap is where that credibility leaks out.[00:09:00]

So why not add a couple of trust questions to your pulse surveys? Ask people directly whether they believe what they hear from leadership, and then close that loop and tell them, "Here's what you said, and here's what we did." So how do we then build trust? So you might have done that little bit of an audit and gone, "Hmm, okay, people are not trusting anything that's coming from leaders and group wide comms.

What do we do?" Well, if you've read my books, if you've followed me for a while, you've heard me speak, you'll know I talk about the three Ts of trust for change and crisis comms, and those same three Ts apply to your group wide and leadership comms, and they are transparent, timely and thoughtful. So transparency, that means being open, honest, and authentic within boundaries, of course, because we don't want to breach privacy or confidentiality.

But people can tell when someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and that just breeds more suspicion. A study in 2017 by Jiang and Menn, which [00:10:00] surveyed, uh, just under four hundred US employees, found that authentic leadership, transparent communication, and employee engagement all led to employee trust in the organisation.

And here's the interesting bit, authentic leadership on its own wasn't directly linked to trust. It worked through a transparent communication climate, so having that culture of transparency and engagement. So an authentic leader isn't enough if the wider comms culture is not transparent or open.

Gartner also found that low trust most often comes from leaders withholding information, scapegoating or retracting decisions. But on the flip side, employees are four point three times more likely to trust leaders who explain their decisions, even when they don't agree with the outcome, and that matters when things are volatile.

And being transparent also means letting your guard down. When your walls are up and people can't connect with you or with the leader that you support, [00:11:00] trust is really hard to build. It's just how humans work. We need to connect before we feel safe enough to trust. Uh, research by Maryam Kouchaki and her colleagues found that when a leader discloses a minor weakness, people rated them as more authentic, trustworthy and genuine.

Interesting here, the effect was really strong for leaders, but not for our peers, and it held up with a video message from a real Google executive in an in-person experiment. So a little humanity goes a long way. Be transparent in the messages you send and in how you show up when you send them. The second T is timely, and that means giving people information when they need it.

Not too late when they're thinking, "It would have been good to know all this before I did all this work," and not too early when all it does is add to the noise and people are wondering why you're telling them anything. You're looking for kind of that Goldilocks timing. A good rule of thumb here is ask yourself, "Would I rather my team hear this from [00:12:00] me before they hear it from someone else?"

At the group wi- wide level, ask yourself, "Would we rather people hear this from the business before they hear it from media or a customer?" And hopefully the answer to both those questions is yes. Because for leaders, timely also means regular check-ins and genuine quality time with your team. It's not just that passing hello as you walk past their desk in the morning or, you know, a hello on Teams if you're in the hybrid environment.

If you're leading a newly formed team in particular, set up regular one-on-ones with a structure so you can both prepare for those meetings. Those check-ins keep information flowing at the right time, they help people feel heard and valued, and they build trust, as long as, of course, those conversations are genuine.

And Gallup backs this up. They found engagement is highest among employees who have some form of daily communication with their manager, and the managers who mix face-to-face, phone, and digital communication are the most successful. So that's [00:13:00] timely, and the third T is thoughtful, and that covers a few things.

Firstly, how you communicate. Tailor it to your audience, the channel, the voice, the timing of the comms, and make sure the message is relevant and actually useful for that audience. Secondly, show that you've listened to your people. Gartner found employees are 6.5 times more likely to trust leaders who show genuine concern for the issues employees actually care about.

And the third is basic empathy. The people you're talking to have feelings, and those feelings are valid, so acknowledge them upfront. When you think about how people might react to your message, you can really then start to shape in ways that mean much more to them. If you're going through a merger acquisition or a restructure with redundancies, for example, think about the employee's thought process in that situation, not just your own, and think about how you could thoughtfully address that in your communication.

If you want to see those three [00:14:00] Ts in action, then I suggest having a look at Canva's recent restructure announcement. Now, we could debate whether layoffs are ever necessary, but we're not going to. That's not the purpose of this conversation today. Let's just look at the comms through the lens of the three Ts.

So in terms of transparency, the co-founder and CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins, published the full note she sent to staff on Canva's newsroom. Now, you could argue they could have said more about the why, but she was pretty frank that the company's growth had slowed for the first time in a decade. In terms of thoughtfulness, she called it the hardest moment in Canva's thirteen-year history, and the note set out a pretty substantial support package for people leaving.

And that included, for most people, I think, at least six months pay, healthcare where it's eligible, career coaching. They could keep their MacBooks, so they could use those to apply for jobs and whatever, um, and grants for people who wanted to start their own businesses. I can't say whether the tone was genuine because I've never worked at Canva, but from [00:15:00] the outside it did seem pretty genuine.

And in terms of timely, look, restructures in and of themselves are tricky because you're working within those HR and legal timeframes. And in Canva's case, you've also got staff who are spread across thirty-seven countries. They all have their own local rules about when those conversations can happen, and you've got lots of different time zones.

So that does create a challenge, but the CEO did cancel non-critical meetings for the rest of the week. She gave staff the option of taking the day off to process without using leave. Um, they've set up company all-hands to talk through the changes and answer questions. They've also given those people who are leaving the business a little bit longer to access their email and their Slack channels so that they can then use those to say goodbye in the way that works for them.

So if you haven't seen it yet, I do recommend finding that note on Canva's newsroom and just looking at it through the lens of those three Ts. Okay, so today we talked about why people don't trust [00:16:00] your comms, why it matters, and what to do about it. The three big reasons trust is eroding in leadership and group wide comms are, number one, the say-do gap.

When people see a big obvious gap between what's in the comms and what's happening on the ground, trust disappears pretty fast. The second reason is a gap in leadership comms capability. Leaders may think they're communicating well, but their people are disagreeing, and if leaders are not self-aware or aren't making space for feedback, it only gets worse.

And if people feel like they're not getting the whole story, they will definitely treat your message with suspicion. Number three, AI generated messages, especially the personal ones. They erode credibility, and they send a signal that you don't care. So to build trust, we use the three Ts: transparent, open, honest, genuine communication because people can tell when they are not getting the full story.

Number two is timely. Not adding to the noise, but not ambushing people either. [00:17:00] Give people the time they need to process. And number three is thoughtful, tailored, empathetic communication that meets people where they at, where they're at and shows that you actually listened. And if you do all of those things, you've got a pretty good chance of your comms being trusted.

Now, of course, comms, uh, your trust is very easily lost. It's hard to build. So the big caveat around all of these things is consistency. You have to consistently show that you can be trusted before people will trust you. In some organisation, that's easier said than done, I know. But hopefully, some of the content that we've covered in today's, uh, podcast, especially some of those research statistics, can help you make the case for why you need to build that trust in your organisation.

And I would start with trying to do a little bit of an audit, find out what people actually really think of your group comms. I'm not just saying, "Is the communication poor or not poor?" But asking, "Do you trust it?" And then going from [00:18:00] there. All right, team, that is all we have time for today. We only have four more episodes left of this season.

So once again, if there's anything you'd like me to cover as we head towards the end of the year, please get in touch and let me know. I am all ears. Until then, keep doing amazing things, and bye for now