Transformation Is Happening to Your People, Not With Them

Edelman has released its 2026 Trust at Work findings, shared by CEO Richard Edelman on October 6. The study surveyed more than 10,000 employees across ten markets, and the numbers move in one direction. Trust in co-workers fell from 82% to 73%. Trust in direct managers fell from 79% to 72%. Trust in "my CEO" fell from 70% to 66%. Each is a record low in the series.

Edelman ties the decline to transformation. Over the past year, 76% of employees went through at least one major change at work, most often AI implementation, followed by shifts in strategy. One in three say the experience was not positive.

Same Change, Different Experience

The finding that should stop every leadership team is who had the bad experience. Associates are about three times as likely as executives to say their transformation was less than positive, 49% compared with 17%. Mid-level employees sit in between at 26%.

In other words, the people who designed the change and the people living with it are describing two different events, and that gap rarely shows up in a status report. Leaders see the strategy, the sequence and the payoff. The people doing the work often receive the change without that context, and they fill the silence with worry. That worry has somewhere to land. Three in four workers in the study fear losing their jobs to automation, tariffs, offshoring or a lack of training.

Edelman also found a gap of more than 21 points between what employees expect from their employers on pay and internal mobility and what they believe they receive. When people can't see where they fit after a change, they tend to assume they don't.

None of this means the transformation was wrong. It means it was delivered as if every person would experience it the same way. They never do.

When Trust Breaks Sideways

Most conversations about trust are about whether people believe their leaders. Edelman's most revealing number is about peers. Among employees whose transformation went well, 77% trust co-workers who hold different values. Among those whose transformation went badly, that falls to 50%.

When change feels like something done to people, they pull in toward those who think like them. Teams become insular at the exact moment they need range. A rollout meant to make the organization more adaptive ends up making its people more guarded with one another. That is how a well-designed plan can look like progress on a dashboard while the culture underneath it quietly narrows.

I think of real reinvention as reclamation. Done well, it gives people the chance to bring more of who they are to new work: their judgment, their experience, the problems they are naturally good at solving. Done poorly, it is substitution. New tools arrive, the same fears remain, and trust leaks out through the cracks. I wrote about the people most at risk of being left behind in Don't Leave the Engine Room Behind, and Edelman's data shows the cost of doing exactly that.

Transform With People, Not Around Them

Playbooks matter in any transformation. At scale you need common tools, clear timelines and consistent training, and that structure is a real asset. The gap opens when the plan is built only for the system and treats everyone as the same user. People experience change individually. The analyst whose role is half automated, the manager asked to explain something she doesn't yet understand and the veteran wondering whether her expertise still counts are each living a different version of the same announcement.

The upside is in Edelman's data too. Employees who had a positive transformation experience were far more likely to be committed to a long-term career with their employer, 83% compared with 51%. They were also more likely to go above and beyond, 83% compared with 57%. Getting the human side right is where the return on the change actually shows up, in commitment, effort and the willingness to stay.

Three moves to make this week:

Ask associates, not only your leadership team, how the last major change felt. Then compare the two sets of answers. The size of the gap tells you how much work remains.

Before the next rollout, explain the why directly to the people whose daily work will change the most, and ask what they need to succeed. As I wrote in Mindsets Shift Faster When the Room Shifts Too, people adapt faster when the environment adapts with them.

Give every person one conversation about what the change means for them specifically: their role, their strengths and their next step. Name what you see in them that the new way of working will need. That conversation costs an hour. Losing their trust costs far more.

People will carry a change they helped shape. They will only endure one that was done to them.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.