Workers' Trust in Their Coworkers Falls to 73%, a Record Low Across Edelman's Seven Tracked Markets

Trust in coworkers has fallen from 82% to 73%, in direct managers from 79% to 72% and in the CEO from 70% to 66%, each a record low in Edelman's data series, and those trend figures are a seven-market average tracked since 2021. The new Edelman study ties the slide to workplace transformation, and a separate PwC survey of 49,364 workers across 48 countries and regions found workers facing rapid change and rising workloads too. For Metaintro readers, the useful part is not the headline drop but the detail underneath it, covering which changes break trust, which ones build it, and what an employee can do about it in their own team. Here is that detail.

What Did the 2026 Trust at Work Study Find?

Edelman's 2026 Trust at Work study is an online survey of 10,018 respondents across 10 countries, with fieldwork conducted Aug 14 to Aug 31, 2026, covering Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, South Africa, the UAE, the UK and the U.S., with the data limited to people employed by an organization.

The workplace study is separate from the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer published in January, which surveyed nearly 34,000 respondents across 28 countries. Trust at Work figures in this article come from the 10,018-respondent sample, and January barometer, 2024 edition, Gallup, PwC and McKinsey figures are labelled where they appear.

Trust in employers fell 5 points to 74% since August 2024, the first decline since 2021, a figure that is a seven-market average.

How Far Has Trust in Coworkers, Managers and CEOs Fallen?

Between August 2024 and this year's wave, trust in my co-workers declined from 82% to 73%, in my direct manager from 79% to 72% and in My CEO from 70% to 66%.

These trend lines use the seven-market tracking average of Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the U.S., which leaves out Canada, South Africa and the UAE, so the coworker figure describes those seven markets, not all ten countries in the 2026 sample.

Across eight tracked markets, employees feel less trusted by leaders over the past two years, with significant declines in feeling trusted by managers, executive management, and heads of HR, and 30% of employees across all ten countries feel executive management does not trust them.

Just 41% of Australian workers trust senior management, down from 50% in 2025, while only half trust their direct manager, down from 61% in 2025, among the 1,250 Australian respondents to PwC's 2026 Hopes and Fears survey.

What Kind of Change Are Employees Living Through?

76% of respondents have experienced at least one transformation in the past twelve months, including over 90% of executives, 86% of mid-level managers and 61% of associates. The most prevalent transformation that employees experienced is implementation of AI (53%), followed by strategy shifts (47%). The full list in the study also includes culture shift (45%), layoffs or workforce reductions (38%) and merger or acquisition (33%), and AI implementation means employees were newly expected to use AI tools, such as generative AI-based platforms, in their day-to-day tasks.

Three-fifths (58%) of those who have experienced change in the workplace feel there has been more change in the last year than in previous years, and almost one-third (27%) say that feeling fatigued or burned out limits their productivity, PwC's separate 2026 Hopes and Fears survey found.

64% of workers had used AI at work in the past 12 months, up 10 points on last year, and daily generative AI use rose from 14% to 22% in the same PwC survey, fielded in May and June.

Associates (49%) are three times more likely to have a less than positive experience in transformation than executives (17%) or mid-level employees (26%), and in Edelman's definitions associates are entry level and experienced non-manager staff. Learning is uneven too, since 53% of Australian senior executives learned new tools, compared with just 19% of non-managers, PwC's Australian results show.

Transformation can divide or unite an organization, Edelman CEO Richard Edelman wrote, according to the Edelman Trust at Work blog post.

Why Do Some Changes Break Trust While Others Build It?

Among employees with at least one bad transformation experience, the top five reasons were these:

• They had to take on more work than they were doing before without additional pay.
• It wasn't clear why the change was made or how it aligned with the company's long-term strategy.
• It created divisions among employees, making it more difficult for them to work with people they disagree with.
• It came as a complete surprise and they didn't have time to plan for or adjust to it.
• It made it harder to adequately meet the needs of the company's clients and customers.

Among those with at least one good experience, the top reasons were that their workload became more manageable, it was clear why the change was made or how it aligns with the company's long-term strategy, they received adequate training or guidance about how to adjust, it became easier to adequately meet the needs of clients and customers, and they received more upward mobility and opportunity for career growth, and Edelman sums this up as workload is the top driver of a bad or good transformation experience.

There is a 33-point drop in trust in My CEOs (from 82% among those who had a positive experience to 49% among those who had a negative experience) and 25-point drop in trust in My Manager (from 85% to 60%), plus a 27-point drop in trust in co-workers with different values, from 77% to 50%.

Employees with a positive experience will go above what's expected to help the company succeed (26 point increased effort from 57% among those who had a negative experience to 83% among those who had a positive experience) and are committed to a long-term career at the company (32 point increase from 51% to 83%).

67% of employees with at least one good transformation experience credit being empowered to adapt on their own terms, a group of reasons that covers adequate training or guidance, adequate time to plan for and adjust to the change, new tasks that were highly visible to leadership, would get them promoted or were a greater stretch of their skillset, and having their concerns listened to.

What Are Workers Most Worried About?

Across Edelman's eight tracked markets, 77% of employees worry about losing their jobs due to factors such as automation, offshoring, insufficient training, or tariffs, up 4 points since August 2024, and one in four expect to be laid off soon.

More workers cite economic volatility (57%) than AI taking on more tasks (44%) as the biggest risks to job security in PwC's global survey, and only a third report having money left at the end of the month, down 8% year on year.

Six in ten employees fear that they are being monitored by their employer without their consent, and this is more the case in developing markets (India 80%, UAE 74%, South Africa 71%) and among executives (71%) than associates (50%), a figure taken across the nine markets where it was asked, excluding China.

There is a twenty-one-plus-point gap between what employees expect for compensation and internal mobility versus what employers deliver, and less than half of Australian workers believe they are fairly paid in PwC's Australian results.

Employees also feel less comfortable discussing societal issues they disagree with colleagues on, such as discrimination (down nine points, to 56%) and climate change (down six points, to 65%) since 2022. Political friction is another potential culprit behind falling trust between colleagues, Fast Company wrote.

Are Managers Under Strain as Well?

The engagement decline was most acute among managers, Gallup found. Global employee engagement declined for the second year in a row in 2025, to 20% from its peak in 2022 of 23%, and manager engagement declined by five points from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025. Last year, low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of GDP, in the 2026 State of the Global Workplace study.

Whether an employee's direct manager actively champions AI is the strongest predictor of whether employees use AI, aside from technical integration, a Gallup U.S. workforce survey in Q1 2026 found. In the same Q1 2026 survey, 18% of U.S. employees say it is somewhat or very likely their job will be eliminated in the next five years due to technological innovations such as automation or AI.

Roughly one in five respondents across every level of the organization report feeling anxious about AI-related changes at work in McKinsey's survey on AI readiness, cited in an August 2026 article, rising to one in four for middle managers. Respondents who report low trust in their organizations' support during AI transformation are 1.5 times more likely than those reporting high levels of trust to feel anxious about workplace changes related to AI.

Just 51% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need, down from 59% last year, and the shortfall is deepest among the 56 percent of respondents PwC calls the engine room, where only two in five say they have access to the learning and development resources they need.

Who Do Employees Trust to Tell Them the Truth About Change?

When a transformation is under way, my manager ranks #1 and my CEO ranks #2 as the people employees would most trust to tell them the truth about why it is happening, across AI integration, strategy shifts, culture shifts, layoffs and mergers, with coworkers at the same job level third, and employees want to hear about change through two-way conversations, such as a meeting with their team or talking with their manager, rather than one-way information such as email.

McKinsey's authors wrote that reassuring messages that no jobs will be lost may temporarily ease anxiety, but they do not necessarily build trust, and that the first time AI displaces jobs, the leaders who implied that wouldn't happen will lose employees' trust.

Daily AI users in PwC's global survey were 15 points more likely to trust top management, and 68% of them were confident in their job security, against 57% of infrequent users.

Employees don’t expect leaders to have all the answers. They do expect leaders to have a clear plan and to communicate honestly about what they know, what they don’t know, and how decisions will be made, according to the McKinsey article on trust in AI transformations.

What Did the 2024 Edition Show, and What Has Changed?

The 2024 Trust at Work study covered 8 countries and nearly 8,000 respondents, seventy-nine percent of employees surveyed globally trusted my employer, and when employees felt executive management did not trust them, they did not trust their CEO (only 25 percent trust), their manager (43 percent), or their head of HR (31 percent).

Two years later, Richard Edelman's post on the 2026 study names truth well told, commitment to reskilling, employee agency and empathetic leadership as the game plan.

Forty-two percent of employees say they would rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values, the January 2026 barometer found. My coworkers (+11) was among the groups that saw net trust gains due to recent major events in the same January survey, which is a net shift in a different 28-country survey, not a trust level for the Trust at Work sample.

What This Means for Your Career, and How Can You Build Trust Through Change?

Our take is that the record lows are less about people turning cold on each other and more about change landing badly on the people with the least say over it. Associates are three times more likely than executives to have a negative experience, the top complaint is more work without additional pay, and employees rank their manager first as the person they would trust to tell them the truth about a transformation in Edelman's data, while PwC's global survey finds workers facing rapid change, rising workloads and greater cost-of-living pressures. Managers also shape how change lands, and Gallup found a manager championing AI to be the strongest predictor of AI use, aside from technical integration, in its Q1 2026 U.S. survey.

Here is what we would do:

• Ask your manager for the support that marks good experiences. Ask for guidance, time to plan and a chance to have concerns heard by name, in a one-to-one, before the change hits your workload. McKinsey found that people with low trust in their organization's support are more likely to feel anxious about AI change.
• Name workload changes early. Burnout is seen as the biggest drag on Australian workers' productivity (31%), with workload and a lack of time closely behind. Write down what you took on, using a letter to your boss about workplace concerns, and raise it in your next review.
• Learn the AI tools your team is being asked to use. PwC's daily AI users were more confident in their job security, and the guide to free and low-cost ways to learn AI skills is one place to start building that habit.
• Ask for training in writing. With only 51% of workers in PwC's global survey saying they can access the learning and development resources they need, a written request gives you a record if access is tight.
• If you lead people, say what you do not know. In 2025 Gallup found 79% of managers engaged within best-practice organizations, so a well-run team is possible even when the wider numbers fall.
• Read a bad rollout as a career signal. If change keeps adding work with no guidance or growth, compare how other employers handle change. Some workers already plan moves, with almost a third (29%) of PwC's front-runners, workers with scarce skills and strong AI capabilities, very or extremely likely to change employer in the next year.

Related Articles

• Why Employees Have Quietly Stopped Trusting Senior Leadership
• AI Workplace Surveillance Is Quietly Breaking How We Work
• The Career Development Gap Most Workers Blame on Themselves Is Their Manager
• How to Roll Out an AI-First Strategy Your Team Actually Trusts
• Bosses Pushed Workers to Use AI, and It Backfired
• The Middle Manager Isn't Dead, But the Job Is Changing Fast
• Why Your Coworkers Matter More Than Your CEO When It Comes to AI Adoption
• Microsoft Tackles Trust After Layoffs
• Why Good Hires Alone Won't Save a Failing Transformation

People Also Asked

Q: How many workers trust their coworkers in 2026?

A: In Edelman's seven-market tracking average of Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the U.S., trust in coworkers fell from 82% to 73%, a record low.

Q: How many people did the 2026 Trust at Work survey cover?

A: The study surveyed 10,018 respondents in 10 countries between Aug 14 and Aug 31, 2026, which is separate from the January barometer of nearly 34,000 respondents across 28 countries.

Q: Is trust in managers falling in other surveys too?

A: In PwC's Australian results, yes, since only half trust their direct manager, down from 61% in 2025. Gallup measures engagement rather than trust, and found manager engagement declined by five points from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025.

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