This week I’m excited to share with you the first episode of the Track Changes On podcast. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while, then usually just filing it away in the “too hard” or “worry about it later” basket, so I’m actually quite proud that I’ve got this one off the ground.
It’s definitely not perfect - and I’ve already got a list of things I need to do better for next time - but it’s here, it exists and it can be ticked off the list!
To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I wanted to revisit a topic I’ve been talking about for a while now - trust in corporate workplaces. A couple of months back, I posted a short Instagram Reel asking whether trust between companies and their employees is currently breaking down. I honestly didn’t expect to get much of a response from this particular piece of content, but the response ended up surprising me.
The video has now been viewed almost 300,000 times and I still see people from all around the world adding comments every day, each of them describing remarkably similar experiences. They talked about the stress and disruption of repeated restructures, broken promises, workloads that never seem to get any lighter and a growing sense that something fundamental has changed in corporate work.
My initial gut reaction was “there’s a lot of discontent out there”. But was it actually about a loss of trust? The more I read the comments, the less convinced I became. I started looking at the research, and that’s where things get interesting.
The research tells two different stories
The first place I looked was Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. Every year, it tracks how employees around the world feel about work, measuring everything from engagement to wellbeing.
The findings here are pretty clear. After more than two decades of gradual improvement since the early 2000s, employee engagement has been falling over the past few years - since around 2022, when our satisfaction at work hit its peak. More people are feeling disconnected from their work and less enthusiastic about their employers than they were just a few years ago.
That finding strongly lines up with what we’re seeing on social media right now - discontent, anger, disengagement from employees. However, there’s another study I use quite a bit in my agency work that’s worth considering - Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It tells a slightly different story.
Every year, Edelman measures public trust in four major institutions: business, government, the media and NGOs. This year’s results found that employees still trust their employers more than any of the other institutions measured. In fact, trust in employers has remained relatively strong over the past few years, and has even increased slightly since the early 2020s.
How do those findings fit together? If employees still trust their employers, why is workplace engagement falling?
I think the answer to this lies in organisational psychology. More specifically, in the difference between two types of trust that shape our experience of work - and the dissonance employees experience when those two types of trust fall out of alignment.
The psychology behind the paradox
Organisational psychologists have long recognised that there’s more than one kind of trust at work.
The first is trust in the organisation itself, or what some researchers call institutional trust. It’s whether or not you believe the company you work for behaves ethically, treats its customers fairly and generally tries to do the right thing.
The second type is far more personal. It’s what we might call relational trust, or the trust that exists within our own relationship with our employer. It’s whether or not you believe that your hard work and contribution will be fairly recognised, that promises will be kept, and that your loyalty and commitment will be reciprocated.
One of the foundations of relational trust is what we call the psychological contract between yourself and your employer. Unlike your employment contract, the psychological contract is never written down. It’s the set of unwritten expectations that develops over time; and it shapes how fair and reciprocal the relationship feels on both sides.
When either party fails to live up to their side of this unwritten contract, or the terms are repeatedly broken, a psychological contract breach occurs. And this can be devastating, because it’s where trust is created and lives.
When the two types of trust don’t align
When times are good, these two forms of trust tend to reinforce each other, which is probably what we were seeing earlier in this decade. If you believed your organisation was ethical and well run, your own experience as an employee generally reflected that. The organisation’s values felt real, because you experienced them yourself.
For many people, that no longer seems to be the case. Your employer might still be a responsible organisation, which is what the data from Edelman is telling us. You might think that it genuinely cares about is customers and generally behaves in an ethical manner. There’s no corruption or illegal practices.
At the same time, your own experience may be one of repeated restructures, frozen salaries, increasing workloads or promises that disappear into the ether, almost as soon as they’re made.
From a psychological standpoint, it’s genuinely hard to hold two conflicting views of anything in our heads at the same time - and that includes who we work for. In an attempt to resolve the tension in our heads, we usually resort to a process called sensemaking, which I’ve written about before.
Sensemaking is our brain’s attempt to build a coherent explanation when our experiences no longer match our expectations. Unfortunately, sensemaking adds an incredible amount of cognitive load to your day-to-day existence. It’s invisible work, and you probably don’t even realise you’re doing it.
Not only are you trying to do your job, you’re also trying to interpret decisions, reconcile contradictions and explain away experiences that no longer seem to fit the relationship you thought you had. It’s exhausting, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this process is contributing to the rise in reports of burnout right across corporate right now.
How to protect yourself
My previous article on sensemaking at work offered some advice on how to protect yourself in this kind of contradictory environment. You can try looking for patterns rather than isolated moments, writing things down and talking to someone for an independent perspective.
On top of this, something else has become increasingly clearly to me over the past five years since I left corporate and started working for myself. I really needed a bit of distance to see it, but it’s incredibly important to understand.
Many of us still think about work as though the relationship between employer and employee is built on mutual loyalty. When times are good, and companies are looking to retain and attract employees, that feels like reality. It’s mutually beneficial to go “above and beyond” on both sides.
In reality, the relationship has probably always been more commercial than we’d like to admit. Most of us understand that organisations have responsibilities that extend well beyond any one employee. They have shareholders, customers, regulators and commercial realities to navigate. Sometimes those priorities will conflict with yours - particularly in a tough economic environment.
That isn’t necessarily a betrayal; but it is a timely reminder of the reality of the relationship.
For a long time, many organisations encouraged employees to think of work as family (one of my least favourite things to hear), and to invest emotionally in the organisation’s purpose. To go “above and beyond” when required.
Unfortunately, that kind of extra effort isn’t necessarily being rewarded or even recognised in the current environment. Right now, your employer has moved back into transactional mode, and perhaps you haven’t moved with them.
If your mindset is still in the “people first”, “we value our people” era of 2021-2022, you’re most likely feeling incredibly disappointed right now. Your employer might have moved beyond this thinking to focus on “efficiency” and even being “AI first”.
Adjusting your mindset and boundaries to be more transaction at work doesn’t make you cynical, and it doesn’t mean you’re quiet quitting. You can care about your work and your colleagues; and you can want to do an excellent job.
At the same time, you can recognise that your professional value and your career belong to you. Rather than spending more energy wondering whether you can trust your employer, or hoping they will return to the relationship you once thought you had, a better use of that energy is learning where to place your trust instead.
You can care deeply about your work, but remember that your career is ultimately yours to manage. Organisations will always make decisions through a commercial lens. There’s no reason you shouldn’t think about your career with the same level of care.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
Recording the first episode of my podcast was a fascinating experience, not just because I had to learn the technical side of podcasting (it’s harder than I thought it would be!) - but also because it exposed all the little conversations you have with yourself when you try something new.
Who am I to call myself a podcaster?
Are people expecting something more polished?
Did that edit sound awkward?
Does my voice really sound like that?
Why did my cat decide that the exact moment I hit record was the perfect time to sprint up and down the hallway?
The funny thing is, I know exactly what I’d tell anyone else in the same position. People don’t want perfect. Stop putting yourself under the microscope. And also, just stop thinking about it and actually do it!
I’ve already got a growing list of lessons for episode two. Better microphone placement and editing. Closing the hallway door before recording so my cat doesn’t decide to make himself known would probably help as well. Like most worthwhile things, it’s a skill I’ll develop over time.
Thank you for joining me from the very beginning, and bearing with me while I get things right. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this takes us.
Things I’ve made (and you can buy)
If you enjoy my content and would like to support my work, here are a few things I’ve created.
🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs and drinkware for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment
