Employers are the most trusted institution. That should worry you

21 January 2026

Sharon O’Dea:

Some thoughts on this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer:

If you work anywhere near communications, you’ll already have clocked the headlines from this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer.

The big one: “My employer” is now the most trusted institution people have. More trusted than government, media or NGOs.

That statistic is about to metastasise across every strategy deck, leadership offsite, and earnest LinkedIn post about “the opportunity for employers to lead”.

The data captures something many of us recognise. As trust in public institutions collapses, people retreat into smaller circles. Work becomes one of the few places where people still expect some degree of order.

But being the most trusted institution left standing is not the same as being genuinely trustworthy. It’s like being the best-behaved person at a stag do; technically impressive, but not exactly a moral triumph.

Before internal communicators rush to embrace “trust brokering” — Edelman’s proposed solution — we should ask: What kind of trust are we actually talking about?

What Edelman gets right

The Trust Barometer lands strongly because it tells people what they already suspect, but with graphs.

This year’s report captures a world that feels narrower and more anxious. Trust has retreated away from abstract institutions and towards people you can actually see.

People trust their coworkers more. They trust their CEO more than distant politicians. They trust “my employer” far more than government or media — which says less about corporate virtue than the absolute state of everything else.

Edelman also gets this: it’s about fear. Fear of economic displacement. Fear of being replaced by a bot. Fear that your children will spend their lives renting rooms owned by pension funds.

In that context, people pulling inwards isn’t moral failure. It’s survival strategy. When the future feels unstable, trust becomes local.

Employers now sit in a uniquely influential position. Edelman is right about the direction of travel. Where things get dodgy is what they suggest we do about it.

The seductive appeal of trust brokering

Edelman’s solution: trust brokering. Help people work across difference — acknowledge disagreement, translate perspectives, surface shared interests. Employers, as the most trusted institutions, should facilitate this.

You can see why this resonates. It offers organisations a constructive role without being overtly political. For internal communicators, it suggests evolution from message delivery to dialogue facilitation.

It fits our existing narratives nicely. We already talk about listening cultures, psychological safety, exposure to different perspectives. Trust brokering feels like a natural extension — a way to respond to polarisation without inflaming it. It makes us feel useful, and at a time when we’re also worried about AI encroaching on our jobs, that’s comforting.

The problem isn’t that this is wrong. It’s that it treats trust as primarily a relational challenge, when in most organisations, it’s fundamentally structural.

Trust is a systems problem

The core weakness: assuming trust is an emotional state that can be rehydrated with better listening.

Employees don’t decide whether to trust based on how open a workshop feels. They decide based on what they see over time: who makes decisions, who benefits, who carries the risk. Power, not proximity, matters.

Workplace relationships aren’t symmetrical. Leaders set strategy. Managers control pay and job security. Employees may be invited into dialogue, but rarely into decision-making—and that asymmetry doesn’t disappear because the conversation is well facilitated.

Trust evaporates when people see feedback ignored, listening exercises followed by predetermined outcomes, values invoked selectively. Dialogue without agency doesn’t build trust—it teaches people that participation wastes time.

Workplace mistrust is often entirely rational. People distrust organisations because they’ve watched restructures framed as growth, AI introduced without safeguards, workloads expand as headcount contracts, risk pushed downward while control stays at the top.

Being asked to engage openly feels less like inclusion and more like exposure.

Frame trust as sentiment, and the solution defaults to messaging. Understand trust as system behaviour, and the role shifts—toward making systems legible: how decisions are made, where constraints sit, what won’t change.

Trust grows when people see evidence that hearing leads somewhere. That’s what Edelman sidesteps.

When insularity becomes moral judgement

‘Insularity’ — reluctance to trust people who differ in values or beliefs — now applies to 70% of people globally.

The danger: this subtly relocates responsibility. If trust is low because people are insular, help them become more open. But what if mistrust is entirely rational?

Inside organisations, people don’t shy away from difference because they lack curiosity. They do it because difference frequently arrives wearing authority. A peer with a different worldview is interesting. A manager with one is a potential restructuring footnote.

When people withdraw at work, it’s because they’ve learned that visibility carries risk. That disagreement has consequences. That bringing your whole self to work is a career-limiting move, enthusiastically promoted by people whose whole selves are institutionally protected.

Employees aren’t obliged to trust institutions that ask for vulnerability without protection, participation without power, honesty without reciprocity. Calling that insular confuses scepticism with intolerance.

Trust isn’t a moral virtue. It’s a calculation people update based on what organisations do, not what they say.

A warning, not a victory

Trust in an employer is not the same as trust in a democratic institution. It’s shaped by dependency as much as belief. Your employer controls your income, professional identity and often your healthcare and visa status. That changes the dynamic.

This trust is asymmetric and brittle. It coexists with private scepticism and careful self-censorship. And it evaporates overnight when the redundancy email lands.

If work has become the primary container for trust in a fragmented society, organisations inherit expectations they never applied for. Employees look to their employer not just for pay, but for stability, fairness, and coherence in a world offering none of the above.

That’s punishing for institutions optimised for efficiency and shareholder return.

High trust tempts organisations to overreach—to imagine themselves as neutral arbiters of social cohesion. Most workplaces lack the governance and legitimacy for that role.

When trusted institutions fail, the damage cuts deeper.

The hard truth

The most worrying thing isn’t that people trust their employer more than anything else. It’s that they may not have anywhere else left to put it.

That’s not a mandate to become society’s repair shop. It’s a warning about what happens when you’re the last institution standing and you cock it up.

For communications, the task isn’t to become trust brokers. It’s to tell the truth about the system people are inside: how it works, where constraints sit, what won’t change, and why.

Trust collapses when people stop expecting honesty about how decisions get made and who benefits.

Being the most trusted institution left standing isn’t an achievement. It’s a responsibility we didn’t earn and a test most organisations aren’t designed to pass. We should probably start getting comfortable with failure.