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Trust at work is built through actions, not statements. Paloma Thombley, Vice President of People at Handshake, makes the case on Reimagining Company Culture for treating trust as the cumulative result of specific operational decisions. Her experience spans rapidly growing startups, established tech, and public-sector employment, which produces a useful triangulation: trust looks different across those settings, but the underlying principle is the same.
Paloma's particular skill is identifying the programs and processes that will break before they break. That is exactly the work fast-growing companies need from their people leaders. Trust requires the operational infrastructure to keep up with growth; companies that grow past their infrastructure produce broken trust at exactly the moment they need it most.
What "Building Trust Through Actions" Means in Practice
Trust-building actions are specific. Promotions that follow documented criteria. Comp adjustments that close gaps without requiring an employee to fight for them. Investigations that close on a predictable timeline. ER cases that get heard regardless of seniority. Each action is small. The cumulative weight is significant.
Gallup research showing managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement on engagement variance points to the same lesson at a different altitude. The manager and the system together produce the trust signal. Companies that have built both produce engagement scores that the rest of the market cannot match.
Identifying Operating Breakages Before They Break
Paloma's argument is that good people leaders are pattern-matchers. They notice the early signals: the rising volume of skip-level requests, the manager whose team is suddenly quiet, the engagement question that dropped two points without explanation. The patterns are visible if someone is looking. Most companies are not looking.
The infrastructure has to support the pattern matching. People team efficiency tools reduce the operational drag that crowds out the pattern matching. Turnover rate by manager and team is a leading indicator most companies under-monitor.
How Do You Catch the Programs That Are About to Break?
Quarterly operating reviews of the people function. Stakeholder feedback from the business leaders the people team supports. ER caseload and resolution-time trends. Each review surfaces something different.
What Is the Most Common Breaking Point in a Fast-Scaling People Team?
The case management workflow. ER cases pile up. Patterns get missed. Investigations slip past their expected timeline. A purpose-built case management platform takes the operational chaos out of the workflow before it breaks.
Developing Teams and Managers at Scale
Paloma's experience as a Handshake leader puts her squarely in the manager-development conversation. Manager quality is the dominant predictor of team-level engagement. The companies that have built manager benches produce different retention numbers than the companies that have not.
The investment is operational. Training cohorts, calibration sessions, peer-coaching circles, and skip-levels on a real cadence. None of it is novel. All of it is unevenly distributed, which is why it produces competitive advantage when consistently applied.
What Actually Works for Trust at Scale
Document the Operating Cadence Publicly
Operating cadence that is documented and shared produces trust faster than cadence that exists only in HR's head. Employees who know what to expect engage more constructively with the people function.
Tell the Workforce What Changed
Closing the loop on engagement input is the single highest-impact trust-building action. Even partial follow-through produces more trust than complete silence.
Build ER Capacity Behind Managers
Managers should not handle ER cases alone. Anonymous reporting creates a path for the cases that managers will not catch. A real ER function handles the cases that need formal investigation.
Where Employee Relations Fits
ER is the function that catches what trust-building actions cannot prevent. Case management infrastructure handles the cases. Pattern data feeds back into the trust roadmap.
How AI Reduces the Operational Drag on Trust Work
Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot, drafts case responses, summarizes histories, and surfaces patterns. The judgment stays with the ER specialist. The drudge work moves to the AI, which gives the people team back the hours required to do trust-building work.
Frequently Asked Questions About Trust at Scale
What is the single most important action a new VP of People can take?
Run skip-levels with every team in the first ninety days. The pattern data produces the strategic priorities. The skip-levels themselves produce the trust.
How do you handle a trust failure caused by a senior leader?
Documented, fast, and visible. The team learns from how the company handles the failure more than from the values document.
What is the right cadence for engagement surveys in a high-growth company?
Quarterly is the floor. Pulse surveys on specific topics work well between full cycles. Annual is too rare for fast-growth.
How do you spot a manager whose team is losing trust?
Skip-level engagement scores diverging from team averages. Quiet 1:1 patterns. Rising attrition without obvious external cause. Each signal is worth investigating.
How does AI affect the trust dynamic in HR?
It accelerates the response loop, which builds trust. AI that drafts case responses lets ER specialists move faster without sacrificing quality. The faster response is itself a trust signal.
How Handshake Builds Trust Through Operational Consistency
Paloma's experience at Handshake illustrates the trust-through-actions discipline at scale. The operational moves are consistent: documented promotion criteria, comp reviews on a real cadence, ER capacity that scales with headcount, and skip-levels that catch issues months before they reach a formal complaint. The consistency is the trust signal.
The pattern travels across high-growth tech. Companies that build operational consistency early absorb the inevitable shocks of scaling without losing the workforce trust that produced the early wins. Companies that scale past their operational infrastructure produce predictable trust failures, and the recovery period is much longer than the prevention period would have been.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Paloma's framing of trust as the cumulative result of specific actions is the right altitude. Companies that produce trust at scale do not announce it; they accumulate it through consistent operational decisions. The patterns compound across years.
SHRM research on workplace burnout continues to surface poor leadership as a top driver of workplace stress, and most leadership stress is downstream of broken trust. The fix is upstream: build the manager bench, document the operating cadence, close the loop on what employees raise.
The trust-through-actions discipline also changes how leaders make hiring decisions for the people function itself. Companies that have done this well tend to hire HRBPs and ER specialists who can build and operate, not just strategize. The hires that work in fast-growth contexts are the people who write the operating cadence and run it consistently. The pure strategists tend to struggle when the operational reality outpaces the strategic plan.
The pattern produces compounding advantages. People functions that combine strategy with operational delivery produce engagement scores that the rest of the market cannot match, retention curves that bend in their favor, and a different kind of internal-mobility data than peer companies. The investment is unglamorous; the results are not.
The compounding effect of these operational disciplines shows up in the data over multi-year horizons. Companies that have built the infrastructure tend to see improving retention, faster issue resolution, and steadier engagement scores year over year. The investment is operational rather than dramatic, but the cumulative outcome is significant for any people team measuring real business impact.
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