As Stephen R. Covey once said, “Trust is the glue of life”. This assertion is supported by research from the fields of social psychology and human capital. Without the bonds of trust there simply can be no effective human relationship. When trust is missing, suspicion, gossip, disrespect and bias live large. Therefore, trust should not be seen as simply one of many factors that drive inclusion and business performance. It should be viewed as the primary factor that facilitates the bonds of inclusion, team belonging, workplace community and corporate cohesion.
While trust should be considered a primary factor in the development of inclusive workplaces, leaders, HR teams and inclusion professionals who seek to develop behaviours and systems designed to promote trust bonds amongst diverse groups should consider a number of critical factors:
A starting point in any trust-based intervention is to recognise that different groups will have radically different perceived levels of workplace-based trust, depending on current and historical bias and levels of prejudice experienced both inside the workplace and within wider society. Experiences of discrimination and othering within a community and neighbourhood setting spill over into high levels of vigilance within the workplace. This spillover effect is specifically true when corporate cultures have lopsided demographics, which in turn leads to power imbalances between diverse groups.
Within this context, diverse colleagues are more likely to experience ‘onlyness’ – being the only woman, disabled person, member of the LGBTQ+ community or the only member of a global majority group, and so on. Onlyness can lead to a constant state of hyper-vigilance, and as described by researchers from the London School of Economics, a sense of being constantly ‘on guard’, which in turn significantly increases an individual’s ‘emotional tax’.
The emotional tax is state of being constantly ‘on guard’ due to past and present experiences of bias, disrespect, exclusion and discrimination. It creates higher levels of psychological trauma within minority groups, who both consciously and unconsciously perceive their identity as being at further risk of bias. Research by the London School of Economics further found that 61% of workers from marginalised racial and ethnic groups are constantly on guard for bias and discrimination in their work teams. Their data also found an intersectional dimension – the level of hypervigilance of marginalised racial and ethnic groups who identify as LGBTQ+ rose to 74%.
The impact of this emotional tax due to a lack of trust and perceived high levels of bias-based risk is significant; diverse colleagues are more likely to experience workplace-based trauma, which impacts levels of co-worker openness and sharing, psychological distance, team withdrawal, individual motivation, engagement and wider team performance.
The bounds between the corporate world and wider social experiences are interchangeable. The rise of global identity politics and an increase in hate crimes and hate speech in wider society places additional pressure on leaders, co-workers and other key business stakeholders to show up in moments that matter. In the UK for instance, the rise of the Union flag and the St. George’s flag (hijacked by the far right) flying across the street in multicultural neighbourhoods – clearly designed to provoke fear and hostility – adds to a lived experience of daily intimidation and the need to be hypervigilant, both within a community environment, but also within the workplace. Such community actions lead to a sense of empowerment for those who wish to promote hate speech inside our corporate spaces.
Research by ACAS has highlighted the rise of identity-based disputes in the last 12 months. While 44% of working-age adults have experienced conflict at work in the last 12 months, diversity-related disputes have doubled; for instance:
Research from Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer finds that communities are retreating into what they term ‘insularity’. This means there is a growing reluctance amongst communities to trust anyone who is different from them. Our work at FAIRER suggests that the retreat into insularity is equally present within the corporate world and that co-workers are increasingly leading ‘parallel lives’.
These trends pose significant challenges to organisational leaders, as current approaches to diversity and inclusion at work lack strategic insight into community building and cross-community trust building. Indeed, current approaches promote the siloing of diverse co-workers, with interventions based not only on cross-community trust building, but on programmes that promote high levels of self-orientation.
Additionally, in a post-George Floyd and Trump-dominated world, many leaders have adopted a position of strategic silence on issues of community hate speech, as they view such matters as political, and therefore outside their areas of responsibility. But such a position of strategic neutrality in a context of co-worker exclusion and fear will increasingly become untenable.
While personal interactions and behaviours have a significant impact on trust-based relationships, we should be careful not to overindex on behavioural measures at the expense of system-led interventions. Our work at FAIRER balances principles of inclusive leadership – emphasising behavioural traits such as curiosity, perspective-taking, and a shift from “power over” to “power with” (including servant leadership and stewardship) – with behavioural science interventions, particularly choice architecture, that operate through system redesign.
Our work suggests that a dual behavioural system-led approach is more likely to impact organisational decision-making that leads to fairer outcomes and opportunities for all.
This point was reinforced in one of our recent workshops by Rufsana Begum, Director of Inclusion & Culture at Macmillan. Rufsana stressed that developing trust in systems is equally important to developing trust with individuals. Core questions for consideration are:
Building and maintaining trust is one of the hardest tasks. It requires constant effort, often through micro-interactions over a long period of time. A useful framework for measuring levels of trust amongst leaders and co-workers is ‘The Trust Equation’ originally developed by Maister, Green and Galford.
The Trust Equation consists of four core components:
Finally, while leaders have a key responsibility to role model the principles of inclusive leadership and set the tone for organisational culture, trust-building should be viewed as a collective effort. As highlighted by Ron Friedman in his Harvard Business Review article, How High-Performing Teams Build Trust, building trust in the workplace cannot – and should not – rest solely on the shoulders of management. After all, trust is built through the behaviours demonstrated by all team members.
For more on leading with inclusion, empathy, and building team trust, explore our Inclusive Leadership programme.