SHRM's CHRO on Building Trust During Times of Change and Uncertainty

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Nicole Belyna: Trust plays a quiet but powerful role in every workplace. It shapes how employees engage with their work, how leaders communicate, and how organizations navigate change. In recent years, many HR leaders have found themselves navigating growing tension between organizational intentions and employee expectations, especially during times of uncertainty, transformation, and rapid change.

When that gap widens, trust can start to feel fragile. Welcome to Honest HR, where we turn the real issues facing today's HR departments into thoughtful conversations and actionable insights. I'm your host, Nicole Belyna. Let's get honest.

Today we're exploring how HR leaders can help strengthen trust and credibility across their organizations, even when decisions are complex and challenges are real. We'll discuss early signals that trust may need attention, how HR can assess alignment between leadership messaging and employee experience, and practical ways to support transparency, consistency, and integrity at work.

Joining us is SHRM's own CHRO, Jim Link, SHRM-SCP – Chief Human Resources Officer. Welcome to Honest HR, Jim.

Jim Link: Hi Nicole. It's great to be here and thanks for the invitation.

Nicole Belyna: Of course. So we'll get started. The recent 2026 SHRM CHRO Priorities and Perspective report shows that nearly half of CHROs rank leadership and manager development as their top priority for 2026. How do you see leadership credibility and organizational trust intersecting, especially in those environments strained by layoffs and changing, ever-changing worker expectations?

Jim Link: When I think about this intersection, the first thing I think about is what I believe to be the definition of trust. Trust for me is the affirmed assurance in the competence, skill, capability, strength, and aptitude of something or someone. That's a mouthful, but it's vitally important that we understand what trust is.

It's also a big burden. When you think about others taking that definition and applying trust to you as a manager or a leader in an organization, no wonder we need to train senior leaders, junior leaders, new leaders, and midlevel leaders in organizations about everything related to the trust factor. To me, that's a very important part of the development of another.

I still remember some early stories from my career. Can we talk about stories?

Nicole Belyna: Sure.

Jim Link: I love stories. I think about early in my career when I was in my second assignment. I was working in a GE facility, and it was a large manufacturing plant. There was one particular leader on that manufacturing floor who employees just absolutely didn't trust, and they would say that to me clearly and subtly.

Very early in my career, I started to wonder, well, why don't they trust him? So I began to ask questions, and it all came down to one team meeting in front of the manufacturing lines where he said something that at that time he believed to be true. As it turned out, it wasn't true, but he got labeled as someone who was not trustworthy because of that one incident.

As a young human resources professional, I began thinking about how we unpack that for our employees working on our manufacturing floor, but more importantly, how do we help them reinstate or reinstill their faith in him as a leader? It was a heavy lift. I thought it would be easy — he'll just tell five truths and that'll outweigh the one mistruth, which wasn't even really a mistruth. It was what was known to be true at that particular time.

I was at that facility for two years, and it took a while for that trust to be reestablished. That's just one illustration of how important it is that we get this dynamic right in our environments today.

Let's add to the fact that we have social media, where everybody's doubting everything everybody's saying in the workplace and otherwise. What is your single source of truth? You put all these things together and it's an interesting compilation of societal expectations, managerial requirements now, and employee expectations. It's a hot mess, but we can sort through it with proper learning and development. It's no wonder that's first on the list.

Nicole Belyna: It is much easier to take a proactive approach versus, to your point, cleaning up the aftermath of one false move, which really wasn't even really a false move but was perceived as such. You bring up a really good point about social media playing a big role because employees can get advice from leadership influencers about how they perceive leadership to be and what an organization might look like. There are just a lot of different factors and resources.

Jim Link, SHRM-SCP – Chief Human Resources Office: I have a good example of this. Just this weekend, my daughter is a senior in college. She's an elementary education major about to get her first teaching job. She's in full-time student teaching right now and loving it. She's starting to apply online.

Last Sunday night while I was sitting in the airport, she sent me screenshots of these application processes and said, "How do I know which ones to apply to? I'm going to go look and see what people say about that employer online — that county school system." I said, "Word of caution, dear daughter. Use that as one tool in your toolbox of looking at things to do." Of course, it must be terrible to have me as a father whenever somebody's trying to get a job because I think I have all the great advice in the world, particularly as it relates to my own kids.

In this particular case, I think it's vitally important that we understand that every type of feedback tool and feedback mechanism — and I know we're going to talk about this later — all those tools and mechanisms are important for us to think about organizational leadership, organizational trust, and even a concept I love to talk about, which is organizational bravery.

How all those things fit together is vitally important, whether you're in a small establishment with 50 or fewer employees, midsize, or large. Those things are still important but vary in different degrees. In smaller organizations, truth and mistruth run faster than they do through larger organizations. Having worked in both sizes, I know and have felt that pain.

Nicole Belyna: The same research highlights that 29% of CHROs are prioritizing employee experience, and 31% are prioritizing workplace culture, both up from last year. No surprise. From your perspective, why does trust remain such a hard problem to solve, even when HR is investing in culture and experience?

Jim Link: When you look at trust as a concept, first of all, it's squishy. You either feel it or you don't feel it. Based on that example we talked about earlier, it can be taken away from you in a heartbeat. I'm also one of those people that believes that trust is established and reestablished time after time after time in interaction and in different circumstances.

When you think about how you put all of these things together, I think our biggest encouragement and the biggest strength or capability that we should provide to our own managers and leaders is that when you build trust and have it established as a guiding principle or as an expectation in that workplace, that's absolutely the best thing that you can do. Then you test yourself against that. You ask in employee engagement surveys about trust.

I've learned over the course of my career that a lot of managers and leaders don't want to touch this topic because it is so squishy. They're almost afraid of it. What I mean by that is imagine a question: "I have trust in my manager." If you're a manager and that trust factor turns out to be very low, you got some soul searching to do to try and figure out exactly what's going on.

If you're an executive human resources leader or a practicing human resources leader in an organization, that's an early warning sign. You have a trigger. You have something that you need to pay attention to. In my mind, you look at the culmination of signals in the workplace to try and determine how you establish that trust, how do you keep it, and don't be afraid to role model those people who are doing it very well because they're obviously doing something right if their scores are high or if employees report repeated instances of trust in that particular manager.

Nicole Belyna: You mentioned this trust factor being kind of an early warning sign. What are some data-backed warning signs that HR can watch out for to indicate a trust breakdown? That's beyond your traditional engagement scores and turnover. What would some other examples be?

Jim Link: Obviously those two are the ones that everybody knows about. I think there are some others, and I like to think of leading indicators rather than lagging indicators. The first thing you need to look at is the business performance of that organization or that unit. How effective and efficient are they?

If you're in a manufacturing or logistics center, how successful are they at reaching their daily goals or hourly goals? How safe are they if you're in a manufacturing or logistics environment? If you look at those leading indicators rather than the traditional HR lagging indicators for the business and in that particular person's area of responsibility, that's a warning sign. That's a bell.

If things have been going very well and all of a sudden something is not working as well in the business outcomes — that line is not producing like it used to in a quality way or those types of factors — that's what I would pay attention to. I think any business measurement, whether it's effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, profit per employee, compounded annual growth rate...

Nicole Belyna: Customer service satisfaction.

Jim Link: That's right. All of those. Anything that you can measure that looks at things that are not traditional human resources that decline could indicate a decline in trust. The opposite is also true. If they're going up, they're doing something right. So you want to replicate whatever that manager or that leader is doing in that particular area.

I assume nothing. Maybe it's because I've been doing this for a minute. There's nothing that I believe to be necessarily true on its face until I look at layer one, two, and three.

Nicole Belyna: I know that about you. SHRM's research shows that 72% of HR leaders believe employees have a higher expectation of their employers today. As those expectations rise, gaps between leadership messaging and day-to-day workplace realities become more visible and can be more damaging. How can HR translate this insight into action when what leaders say doesn't align with how work actually gets done?

Jim Link: I think that's an important question, and there are a couple of components that I think we ought to unpack. The first thing related to that is it's not a surprise to me that employees are looking at their employers for those factors and for those things. Why is that? My first question back to you is, well, where else are they going to look?

It's interesting times societally, governmentally, politically. You name the category that's associated with it, and there's something that's interesting about that right now. The workplace, rightly or wrongly, continues to be a place where individuals look for some sense of security, protection, reliance, and assuredness.

Employers to some extent have not done a very quality job of portraying those things back to employees. All you have to do is read the layoff numbers and look at the restructurings and all these other kinds of things that happen. So that's answer one: where else are people going to turn?

Employers have always been the cutting edge of societal change. Not every, but the vast majority of good ideas that have been memorialized into law, memorialized into societal action, public and private perception and all those kinds of things actually began in the workplace. The history books are full of those examples.

The times we're in now are a clear indication of more of that to come with an expectation for employers to set the standard and to set the expectation. So that's kind of unpacked part one of that.

Now what do we do about that? The absolute best employers out there are those who are just engaged in ongoing civil dialogue and communication with their employees. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. If you're on a manufacturing floor, it's walking down that manufacturing pathway and having a connection with the people who are actually producing that good or product.

It's a wave sometimes. Sometimes it's a "How's your kid? How was that baseball game the weekend before?" Whatever. Wherever that connection is, you gotta find it. It's not going to be achieved if you're a human resources practitioner metaphorically sitting in the office. It's not gonna happen.

If you're in a business in a structure, a business and professional environment where you're on a cube farm or whatever it is, there's also that management by walking around concept, which I still believe is vitally important. I learned very early in my career that to be seen is to be understood and valued or appreciated.

That would make a very interesting discussion when we talk about remote and not remote.

Nicole Belyna: That's exactly what was in my head.

Jim Link: That's right. But that's a whole other day. We'll tackle that one another day. I think we have very common sense, repeatable, low-cost things that we can do as employers to assist our employees because we know now, since we've established the answer to the first part of the question, that when we do good things by our employees, that translates into our communities, into our societies, and into other places where we need to be influential and to have that common sense of taking care of one another.

Nicole Belyna: Well, and you said something really important in the beginning of this last point, which is whether you're in an in-person environment or remote, it's that continuous connection. Whether it's me going to your desk or me sending you a message on Slack or Teams, maintaining that connection and that communication is critical. I think sometimes leaders forget just how important those little moments are versus this grand presentation in front of the entire organization.

Jim Link: This is not a program that you have to run. This is common human decency and respect where you are actually showing some empathy by engaging in a conversation, and it doesn't have to be this contrived, lengthy, planned, structured thing. In fact, I hate that. It's better if it's this real, genuine, authentic touchpoint with someone that you have a modicum of care about.

You don't have to like the person, but you could at least ask what kind of weekend they had. That doesn't mean that the next step is dating. It means that what you're doing is just checking in.

Nicole Belyna: How are you? How can I help you?

Jim Link: That's right. The list goes on. I always tell people — I think you and I have talked about this before — I always encourage evolving leaders in organizations to know one thing about every colleague that they work with. Just one. Just one little simple fact.

When you think about working in a place of 25 to 50 employees, that replicating fact becomes the basis upon which you can start conversations, engage in dialogue, and determine what's really going on in somebody's life. It often gives you this idea of being a bellwether for what's going on in your workplace.

I think good HR people often are those bellwethers for their organizations. That has a little bit to do with the organizational bravery point we were talking about earlier because when you're a bellwether and you find out that something is not good, sometimes it takes a lot of bravery to tell your boss, your manager, your colleagues, your leaders, your peers about those things. So that's where the bravery part of trust and leadership identification and involvement comes into the equation.

Nicole Belyna: We'll be back in just a few moments. Stay with us.

Nicole Belyna: So in your experience, how should HR conduct a credibility check within their own organization? And what specific discrepancies between values and actions tend to surface during those assessments?

Jim Link: I think you use all the tools available to you. Whatever those tools are — and by the way, tools sometimes are just knowledge that you obtained through daily interactions with others, through analysis of emails that you receive. There's all kinds of ways to look at tools.

The best way to think about that is to — and I would even utilize artificial intelligence, by the way — dump those tools into some type of protected, not large language model, but protected artificial intelligence environment to do an analysis and assess that for me. There perhaps could be something in there that you derive that you wouldn't have necessarily thought of before because you are biased and have your own beliefs and opinions about those kinds of things.

I think it's important to utilize every tool, piece of knowledge, and information at your disposal in order to make those determinations. It's still okay in the world in which we live today if you think something's up with someone or something to ask. That's perfectly okay to do that.

"Hey, I noticed that you seem to be down or that you seem to be off. Your responses weren't your normal, sharp, curt self. What's going on with you? Everything okay?" I can't tell you how many times in my career just observing something like that and then asking about it has produced an answer I wasn't expecting. Many of them allowed me to intercede to fix something or make something better.

As all of us great HR people do often behind the scenes, where it's quiet and done and the only person who's aware of the effort that you put into it was the recipient of your empathy. I still think that's important. I still think we should pay attention to those things, but in a broader environment, the data speaks. So whatever that data is and however you're able to collect it, that's what I would pay attention to.

Inclusive of the anecdotal data to show me what I needed to do or how I needed to react as a human resources professional, and maybe more importantly, who I needed to involve with me in that journey to solve the problem. If it turns out a particular manager has a problem communicating or sharing with his employees, grab the best communicator in the organization and use that person as a mentor or coach.

If someone has a very tough time getting to work on time, maybe there's a reason. If there's a reason, let's figure it out and then figure out how to solve that. There are so many things. I think sometimes we get stuck thinking that there's a programmatic answer to some of these things, when in my view, certainly more than half, and I'm inclined to say more than 70 or 75% of the solutions to the things that are really getting in the way of trust or leadership identification or development or succession or anything else is a conversation away from success.

Nicole Belyna: Yeah, just basic communication.

Jim Link: Exactly.

Nicole Belyna: So you've listed off formal and informal ways to gather information, both equally as valuable.

Jim Link: Oh, 100%.

Nicole Belyna: So with economic uncertainty and rising costs also being a big concern for CHROs, how can HR strike a balance between business pressures and workplace culture initiatives?

Jim Link: Not such an easy answer because one of the things that's interesting about what we're seeing right now in the economy is that it's unpredictable. Whether you agree with it or not, where we are, we can all agree that it's unpredictable.

That unpredictability for people who are lower wage earners is stress inducing. It's at its best minimizing the input that those folks can give on a day-to-day basis, particularly when they have other things on their mind. Who's paying for the childcare? Who's paying for the rent? Who's paying for food on the table, not to mention grandma's medications or that kid's medications? Those things are on the minds of people due to the many economic factors that are there.

If you're on the other end of that income spectrum, you're also equally worried because you likely have a 401(k) account. You have been blessed to be employed by organizations your entire life, and you know that those organizations are your lifeblood. If they go upside down, then you're gonna go upside down with them. So let's just face it, this is a stressful mess.

Those times I think are just to be acknowledged by everybody that's listening to this recording today as something that we need to not forget as we are talking with other people in our respective organizations.

Now, the second part of your question is how HR can potentially impact that. I'm gonna broaden that to be how organizations can do that. HR obviously carries a lot of these mantles. It's vitally important in my mind to share the business results with an organization, whether those results are good or bad.

Here at SHRM is a perfect example of that. A year and a half ago we talked very much about how we were on the road to $300 million. We wanted that to be something that we achieved as part of our success. It's a number that we threw out there, realizing it was a stretch. All of 2025, we worked on that plan to get close to $300 million.

We didn't quite make it. Now, did we still produce more revenue than we did the year before? Yes. Did we grow our MEMBERSHIP base? Yes. Did we meet those core objectives? To answer that question is yes, but we also acknowledged in our very first call after the start of this calendar year that we didn't meet the objective that we wanted, but it was still on our radar screen to go out and achieve that.

I just think it's important that you just say that. You just shoot for the moon because even if you miss, you'll be among the stars. I think that's appropriate in this place. The growth and revenue achievements that we had as an organization here at SHRM certainly far exceeded most of our competitive set, and in many cases exceeded publicly traded companies in the organization, all while serving our MEMBERSHIP base with record numbers of activities and engagements and overhauled website, new designs of all of our approaches to our executive network and different MEMBERSHIP tiers.

So all kinds of good things there. Yes, SHRM didn't meet the number achieved, but we did achieve growth. That's an important story to tell, whether you're at SHRM or you're in another organization. What would've happened if we had negative growth? I think we would've told that story too.

Nicole Belyna: Sure.

Jim Link: All that to say, no matter the organization you're in — if you're in a service organization, if you're for-profit, you're not-for-profit — you have a story to tell to your employees, and the story that you tell to your employees should be authentic, transparent, genuine, as factual as you can make it at that moment in time, and always aspiration oriented.

If you get those things right, you're gonna build that organizational trust. You're gonna take a lot of people with you on the journey, wherever it is that you're going, and you're going to reassure those people who may be wondering where the rent payment is going to come from that, at least at that moment in time, they have an employer that cares about them and is interested in them and is willing to tell them the truth in a matter-of-fact way so they can make their own decisions for the future.

Nicole Belyna: I mean, what happens within the organization is something that you can control. The external factors you can't control.

Jim Link: That's right.

Nicole Belyna: There are factors like how transparent you are in communication is something that you can control. The benefits that you provide to employees to perhaps fill in the gaps when times can be a little difficult or remind them that they have certain resources that we provide are things that we can also share.

Jim Link: We just had a situation here at SHRM — and I won't mention any names — where an employee wrote something that concerned me. So I reached out to that employee and I said, "This concerns me. Are you okay right now?" I didn't know that person very well and they didn't know me very well, but because I saw that interchange, my spidey senses went off, making me think there could be something else amuck.

As it turned out, in this case it was absolutely fine. But you also have to trust your own instinct and trust your own set of guiding principles that exist in you as a person in order to ensure that you're doing your best, particularly taking care of those people who might be more easily subjected to the whims of the economy than others.

Nicole Belyna: What role does employee experience data, like engagement surveys or sentiment analysis, play in measuring whether trust rebuilding is actually working?

Jim Link: It's a great tool. It's a fabulous resource to do that. I would rely on those tools, but I would also rely on my own good common sense because if you're doing a great job as a human resources leader, even a business leader in general, you're picking stuff up every day and you learn, I think over time, how to sort through that stuff that you pick up.

You also learn who are your reliable sources of knowledge and information, and those who are the drama kings and queens. I don't have one hot minute for those folks, but all of that kind of stuff goes into this melting pot of knowledge and information. Then the insights and guidance that come out of that melting pot of knowledge and information are both driven by real time data knowledge and information, predictive knowledge and information, and also your own good gut.

All of those things in my mind are equally important, some more or less on any given day. But all of those factors are things I pay attention to.

Nicole Belyna: I think I see engagement surveys as a snapshot in time. As you point out, there's other in-the-moment observations and data that you can collect on a continuous basis to continue to check your gut.

Jim Link: I would encourage folks listening to this to also ignore the stuff that they should ignore. It's very easy to get lost in social media hype or online reviews. It's perfectly possible that you could lose entire hours of your life reading that garbage. Not all of it's garbage — I should correct that. But listen, people go on there to make a point.

I think you have to consider that, and the most likely point people are going to make is when they're not happy about something. So that's a factor that we all have to consider. Do I spend one minute of time reading those types of things? To answer the question is, nope, I don't because I'm more directed and driven by what I see in the workplace every day than I am by what somebody who worked in my workplace or in some other workplace had to say.

I say it's important that you consider all sources for the value they bring. In those cases there are things you can glean from that, but you're not gonna glean it from reading one review by one employee. You're gonna glean it from an analysis, a collective analysis of what has been said, and then you find actionable things to do there.

Nicole Belyna: One thing that I will just add is when you're looking at employee experience data and engagement surveys is when people stop talking. When the participation is down or when there are no comments, that could secretly be a red flag.

Jim Link: Your alarm bell should go off. I believe in patterns of behavior. Somebody asked me one time, "Well, how do you know in an organization when there's gonna be a layoff or a restructuring?" The answer to me is always just when the patterns change.

Different people are showing up in different offices or people are appearing in different places at different times, or there's more behind-door meetings than there used to be or everybody's clammed up.

Nicole Belyna: More pizza delivery.

Jim Link: Yeah, something. There's something different. I think paying attention to those — and it's a pattern, it's not a one-off thing — it's a pattern of behavior that shifts. Understanding that that's also true in the development of trust in an organization. It's also true in how managers and leaders are viewed and reviewed by their employees and their superiors in organizations.

When we look back to that CHRO priorities report, and you think about managerial and leadership development, you think about economic uncertainty and what CHROs and other senior HR leaders are worried about. You think about the impact of technology and AI, you think about the lack of skills, you think about the labor force in general and all those things that came out in that CHRO priorities report.

All of those things are multifactor influences to determine how we need to lead and guide our organizations as highly respected human resources leaders. Not one of those standing on their own is the thing that you should do. But a combination of those types of things and those factors are what will really help us navigate through the next six months, year, and 18 months out.

It's those types of things and those priorities that are going to shape buying decisions and how organizations behave and what employees in those organizations can expect over the course of that same time period.

Nicole Belyna: What's one insight from the 2026 CHRO report that you think HR professionals should center in their credibility restoration efforts, but maybe under-leveraged in practice?

Jim Link: To me, it's really tied to the identification of people in your organization. So this is a combination of those things, not any one. Maybe this is insight rather than a repeat. I think when I read all of that, the thing I want to focus on and pay attention to are early career managerial professional employees. Said another way, almost leaders.

Because those folks are the ones who are really going to be making the difference in organizations in the future, and I believe that if I put one more moment of care, concern, well-being, and feeding into those individuals, I'm going to be doing a solid for my company in the future because they are the future.

Any moment in time you spend with them is an investment in their success, and we just can't underestimate how important that is, particularly now in our resource-constrained environments. If I had to place a bet, that's where I'd spend my bucks.

Nicole Belyna: Well, and we've kind of come full circle here because at the beginning of our conversation you talked about an early career scenario that you experienced. As I think about my own career, the leadership training that I got early on, or not even training, but exposure and mentorship really has followed me through my entire career, even today.

Jim Link: Me too. I still remember who some of those people were who were helping me, and that's been, let's just say more than 10 years ago.

Nicole Belyna: Thank you, Jim, for sharing your insights with us today.

Jim Link,: My pleasure.

Nicole Belyna: That's gonna do it for this week's episode of Honest HR. We'll catch you next time.

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