Leaning Into Trust and Transparency with Sarah Anderegg

In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Sarah Anderegg, Manager of Employee Engagement at PitchBook Data. Sarah focuses on delivering high-impact engagement work, and she has a clear-eyed view of how trust and transparency actually get built inside companies that move quickly. Her take is useful because she is not arguing for trust as a general virtue. She is treating it as an operating input with measurable consequences.

The conversation kept circling a specific idea. Trust is not declared. It is demonstrated repeatedly, and it takes one bad moment to lose what took a year to build. Transparency is one of the few practices that makes trust recoverable, because it removes the speculation that tends to harden when leaders go quiet.

Why Trust and Transparency Are Operating Inputs

Trust is easy to describe and hard to quantify. It shows up in how quickly decisions can move, how willing employees are to raise concerns, and how the organization handles bad news. Transparency is the practice that most reliably produces trust, because it reduces the gap between what leaders know and what employees are told.

The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer on trust at work found that 79 percent of employees globally trust their employer, but there is a stark gap between executives and associates. Only 19 percent of associates trust their CEO to tell the truth about the organization, compared to 52 percent of executives. Closing that gap is where transparency work actually pays off.

Harvard Business Review reporting shows that employees in high-trust workplaces experience 74 percent less stress, 50 percent higher productivity, and 40 percent less burnout. Those numbers are not soft. They map directly to the metrics HR leaders already track.

How Trust and Transparency Show Up in Practice

What does transparent leadership actually look like?

Sharing the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves. Naming tradeoffs explicitly. Admitting what leaders do not know. Publishing the pace and direction of important work, including the parts that are going slower than hoped.

How do you rebuild trust after it has been damaged?Acknowledge the moment specifically, describe what went wrong, commit to concrete changes, and follow through visibly. Generic apology language rarely rebuilds trust. Specific accountability usually does, especially when followed by consistent behavior over the next six to twelve months.

Sarah also distinguished between transparency and unstructured openness. Transparency is a disciplined practice with clear boundaries and a predictable rhythm. Unstructured openness, by contrast, tends to produce confusion, because employees receive a flood of partial information and cannot tell what actually matters. Good transparency is edited.

That editorial layer is often what HR leaders add to the practice. They help the CEO decide what to share, when, and in what form. The more credible the transparency practice becomes, the more employees trust the signals when they arrive.

What Actually Works for Building Trust and Transparency

Principle 1: Share information before you are forced to

Employees can tell the difference between proactive transparency and reactive transparency. Proactive transparency builds trust. Reactive transparency rarely fully restores it. The cost of sharing a difficult update early is almost always lower than the cost of an information vacuum.

Principle 2: Pair transparency with listening

One-way transparency is a broadcast. Real trust requires the organization to respond to what it hears. Regular pulse surveys and anonymous reporting channels give employees a credible way to raise concerns, and the response to those channels is where trust either accumulates or erodes.

Principle 3: Treat ER as a trust test

How the organization handles a case is the most revealing test of whether it actually believes its own values. Teams using structured HR case management and a deliberate ER operating model tend to retain trust through difficult moments because the process is visible, consistent, and fair.

She also flagged the importance of consistency across leadership. Employees compare the stories they hear from the CEO, the CHRO, and their direct manager. When those stories diverge, trust erodes quickly, regardless of how polished any individual leader's messaging is. Alignment is a trust practice in its own right.

Where Employee Relations Fits

ER is the place where trust and transparency get tested under pressure. The employee who raises a concern is asking the organization to act on its stated values. The disposition of that case shapes whether the employee tells their colleagues the process worked or did not. Over time, those conversations determine whether new concerns get raised at all.

ER drill-down: transparency in case outcomes

Most organizations are appropriately careful about individual case details. That said, aggregate transparency about case volume, resolution times, and outcomes is a powerful trust signal. Publishing a quarterly internal update on ER volume, themes, and resolution patterns gives employees evidence that concerns are being taken seriously. Few organizations do this. The ones that do tend to see higher case quality, faster resolution, and stronger trust scores on engagement surveys.

Frequently Asked Questions About Trust and Transparency

Can you over-share with employees?Yes, but rarely in the ways leaders fear. Over-sharing of strategy detail or market speculation can be risky. Over-sharing of decision rationale, context, and honest uncertainty almost always builds trust rather than eroding it.

How do you handle confidentiality during sensitive events?Be transparent about what you cannot say and why. Employees accept legitimate confidentiality constraints when leaders name them openly. Silence without explanation is what erodes trust.

Does remote work change how trust is built?It raises the importance of deliberate communication. Remote and hybrid employees have fewer informal signals about what is happening. Explicit, regular, structured communication is the best way to compensate.

How long does it take to rebuild trust after a major failure?Six to twenty-four months, depending on severity and on whether the response is consistent. One visible follow-through accelerates the process significantly. One visible backslide sets it back substantially.

What is the most overlooked trust practice?Simple clarity about what the organization is and is not going to do. Ambiguity about commitments is one of the main drivers of trust erosion, and clarity is surprisingly rare.

Finally, trust and transparency benefit from a clear commitment to protecting the people who raise concerns. If employees who speak up suffer subtle career consequences, the practice fails regardless of the public messaging. Active retaliation protection, executive modeling, and consistent case handling all reinforce the message that raising concerns is safe.

Parallel research from Harvard Business Review on psychological safety reinforces that trust and transparency are operating inputs rather than byproducts. Teams with high psychological safety produce better outcomes across performance, retention, and innovation metrics.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Sarah's view is a helpful counterweight to leaders who think of trust as a byproduct of good culture. In her practice, trust is an operating input that leaders either invest in or draw down every week. Transparency is the investment vehicle, and it scales across everything from strategic communications to the way ER cases get handled.

HR leaders who make trust and transparency a deliberate operating discipline produce better engagement, better retention, and better case outcomes. The ones who treat trust as a general aspiration usually find themselves scrambling when a specific event demands it.

The work is straightforward in principle and demanding in practice. It requires leaders willing to share information early, respond to feedback publicly, and treat every sensitive case as a trust-shaping moment. That investment compounds. Organizations that sustain it build the kind of internal trust that lets them move faster, hire better, and weather hard moments with their culture intact.

See how AllVoices helps HR leaders build trust and transparency into the case workflows employees experience directly.