Trust sits at the heart of every successful organization. It influences whether people speak up, embrace change, recommend their employer and choose to stay. Like any relationship, trust takes time to build and can disappear remarkably quickly when words and actions no longer align.
The latest Edelman Trust Barometer reinforces why this matters. Trust is becoming an increasingly important issue for organizations, leaders and employees alike, placing greater emphasis on organizations that lead with honesty, communicate with clarity and act with consistency.
It's hardly surprising, then, that internal communication is increasingly being asked to help solve the trust problem.
Internal communication has an important role to play in helping organizations build trust, but we also need to recognize its limits. We can help leaders build credibility, strengthen organizational reputation from the inside out, and identify where trust is beginning to weaken so organizations can respond before it erodes further.
What we can't do is communicate our way out of poor leadership, inconsistent behavior or decisions that don't reflect what employees are being told.
Internal Communication Has an Important Role to Play
When I think about the leaders I've trusted most throughout my career, they all had the following qualities in common: they were consistent, they followed through on commitments, they admitted when they didn't have all the answers, they were willing to have difficult conversations rather than avoiding them, and they treated people fairly, even when the message itself wasn't what they wanted to hear.
While trust can take years to build, I've also seen it unravel surprisingly quickly, usually not because of one catastrophic event, but through a series of smaller moments where actions didn't match words. A commitment quietly dropped, a difficult conversation avoided or a decision that contradicted what employees had previously been told. We often underestimate the power of organizational memory and how long employees remember those moments.
This is where internal communication adds real value. It creates clarity during uncertainty and helps leaders explain not just what but why. It encourages honest conversations rather than polished corporate communications and gives employees the context they need to understand decisions, even when they don't necessarily agree with them.
While internal communication can't create trust on its own, it plays a vital role in creating the conditions where trust can grow. This starts with clarity and consistency.
During periods of uncertainty, employees naturally fill information gaps with their own assumptions. Internal communication provides context, explains the thinking behind decisions and helps reduce uncertainty.
Internal communication also helps leaders communicate with greater credibility—not by producing more polished messages, videos or town halls, but by encouraging leaders to communicate honestly, explain what they know, acknowledge what they don't and resist the temptation to overpromise.
Employee listening has an equally important role to play. Asking for feedback without demonstrating how that feedback influences decisions damages trust far more quickly than not asking in the first place. Closing the feedback loop is one of the clearest ways organizations demonstrate that employee voice genuinely matters, which in turn deepens trust.
Communication Can't Do it All
Where I think our profession sometimes needs to challenge itself is when we assume communication is always the answer. Sometimes, it's better to ask, "What would happen if we didn't communicate?"
Internal communication often exposes deeper issues such as inconsistent leadership, poor decision-making, a lack of accountability or a culture where employees' everyday experiences don't reflect the messages they're hearing. It's much easier to commission another communication campaign than it is to address those underlying behaviors.
Internal communication can help leaders explain decisions more clearly, communicate with greater consistency and create opportunities for honest dialogue.
What it can't do is persuade employees to trust leaders whose actions repeatedly contradict their words. Increasing communication without addressing those behaviors can result in widening the gap between what employees hear and what they experience.
Don't Forget the People Employees Already Trust
The IC Trust Index 2024 reported that line managers remain one of the most trusted sources of information within organizations. That shouldn't surprise us. Managers have the conversations that matter. They're the people employees turn to when they need reassurance, clarification or someone to help make sense of organizational decisions.
The challenge is that we've steadily expanded the manager's role. We expect them to be communicators, coaches, wellbeing champions, change leaders, culture carriers and performance managers, often while delivering demanding operational objectives of their own. It's little wonder many feel overwhelmed.
Rather than asking managers to communicate more, we should be asking how we can help them communicate better while reducing the burden we place on them. One of the most successful pieces of work I've delivered recently focused on exactly that.
Rather than expecting managers to cascade every organizational message, we equipped them with conversation toolkits so they could focus on listening, coaching, providing reassurance and building confidence. That deepened trust while reducing communication overwhelm.
If we care about trust, we should measure it
One question I find myself asking organizations more and more is this: "How are you measuring trust?"
Most organizations measure engagement, wellbeing and communication effectiveness. Very few measure trust explicitly. This is a missed opportunity because trust underpins whether people speak up, embrace change, recommend their employer and ultimately choose to stay.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reinforces that trust has become a strategic issue rather than a cultural one. If that's true, organizations need to treat trust with the same level of discipline as any other business priority.
Questions around whether employees believe leaders follow through on commitments, understand why decisions are made, feel psychologically safe to raise concerns, and believe feedback leads to action provide a far richer understanding of organizational health than engagement scores alone.
If trust matters as much as we all say it does, it deserves to be measured.
Trust Isn't One-Size-Fits-All
It's also worth recognizing that trust isn't experienced in the same way by every generation.
Many younger employees have grown up during a period shaped by financial instability, misinformation, social media and AI. It's understandable that trust is less likely to be awarded automatically and more likely to be earned through consistent behavior.
For internal communicators, that's an important shift and one we must recognize. Influence no longer sits solely with hierarchy or authority; it increasingly sits with credibility.
The people employees trust most may not be the most senior leaders in an organization. They may be respected managers, subject matter experts or peers who consistently demonstrate integrity and authenticity. Identifying those trusted voices and helping them communicate effectively may become one of the most valuable roles internal communication plays over the coming years.
Trust Belongs to Everyone
Internal communicators are increasingly telling me they're under pressure to (re)build trust. I usually challenge that narrative because trust doesn't belong to a single function.
Trust is Everyone's Responsibility
Leaders earn it through decisions and behaviors. Managers strengthen it through everyday conversations. Employees influence it through the culture they create together.
The role of Internal communication is different. Our job is to help organizations understand what trust looks like, identify where it's growing, recognize where it's beginning to weaken and equip leaders, managers and trusted voices to communicate in ways that reinforce the behaviors employees need to see.
Trust has always mattered, but the latest Edelman Trust Barometer suggests it's becoming one of the defining organizational challenges of our time. That means we need to stop viewing trust as something internal communicators create and start recognizing it as something we help organizations protect, strengthen and sustain.
Ultimately, trust is built through leadership, decisions and everyday experiences. Internal communication helps ensure those things are seen, understood and believed.