How to Build a Culture of Trust Through Open Communication: A Six-Step Guide

Employee trust is declining, and your organization could be at risk. Our latest research reveals the critical link between open communication and a thriving workplace – here's what you need to know to build a culture of trust.

We’ve written about how today’s business environment is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Trust and loyalty don’t flourish naturally under these conditions – and our 2025 Compensation and Culture survey shows that employee trust is at a low ebb.

Surveying over 1,800 employees in the U.S. and UK, we found that:

However, trust is crucial for a high performance culture. So how can your organization keep or earn employees’ trust?

We’ve observed that the key is transparent and open communication. When employees believe that their employer is treating them with honesty, they feel empowered and motivated to do their best.

Opening up communication through pay transparency

First, it’s important to acknowledge that some employees initially find pay transparency off-putting. They might think that it will violate their privacy, lead to mutual scrutiny or criticism among colleagues, or negatively impact their pay.

However, if they see it as a sincere effort to put people first – which is the second pillar of a high performance culture – then they are more likely to trust their employer. And when employees see and understand “behind the scenes” pay calculations, they can see that their employer is acting in good faith. 

We go into far more depth in our complete guide, but pay transparency involves:

• Identifying any applicable regulations and policy changes or actions necessary for compliance. 
• Identifying non-required but desirable changes, like putting salary ranges in job postings or measuring and reporting on pay gaps.
• Making sure that pay structures are fair and based on objective criteria.

During these processes, consider the following: 

Normalizing direct and frequent feedback for a high performance culture

Many employees associate feedback with annual performance reviews. However, alternative practices of sharing and acting on feedback go a long way to help open up communication and build a culture of trust. These include:

Peer-to-peer feedback

This can be great for teams, though it may take some initial guidance and examples. Light and fun practices like “Feedback Fridays” are a way of establishing honest, supportive, and regular feedback into the working week.

Employee-to-company feedback

Open communication moves in both directions – not just from leadership to employees, but vice versa. This is best done as a continuous feedback loop: the company regularly solicits employee input, acts on that input, reports back to the employees, and the cycle keeps going. Helpful tools include regular assessments or culture surveys.

Supervisor-to-employee feedback (performance reviews)

The traditional performance review is often uncomfortable for both employees and supervisors, and it’s not a people-first process. Some increasingly popular alternatives are more useful to the employee, flexible, and timely.

Specifically, Continuous Performance Management (CPM) moves away from the high-stakes year-end summary and centers on ongoing feedback, regular check-ins, coaching, and continuous goal-setting.It’s more conducive to performance self-improvement, and it enables managers to recognize and reward high performance immediately – rather than ten months from now.

The C-suite: Leading by example

If an organization wants to build a culture of trust through open communication, its C-suite executives should set an example for employees to follow.

For instance, leaders can model giving and receiving feedback. They can model continuous improvement by acknowledging mistakes or shortcomings and being open about what they learn from the experience.  

Here are a few other ways that C-suite execs have truly led the way: 

• Making notes from executive meetings available to all employees within 24 hours.
• Regular Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, town hall meetings, or anonymous Q&A forums.
• Making the executive compensation structure and pay information visible to the public.  
• Sharing unedited (and possibly unflattering) results of employee surveys.

When C-suite leaders set an example of open communication, it causes a ripple effect throughout the organization. Employees feel more valued, supported, and secure in speaking their minds.

Using effective internal communications

Effective internal communications are essential for building a culture of trust, so it’s important to consider the following:

This review can help you see where your organization may want to be more open and how the current communications practices do or do not support that goal. 

Lastly, consider an open-door policy, where employees can communicate concerns or feedback to managers and leadership. This policy should be put in writing and communicated clearly to all employees. Make sure that remote or hybrid workers understand how they can have those conversations as well.

Using team collaboration tools effectively 

Digital collaboration tools like Zoom, Slack, and Teams played a crucial role in keeping work moving forward during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when many employees were working remotely. Employees are now generally very used to working with such tools, and they can even help improve productivity and workflow for teams that are entirely in-office. 

However, employees can also struggle with collaboration tools. For instance, a 2023 study by the work management software company Asana found that employees spent, on average, about an hour and a half either deciding which collaboration tool to use or switching between tools. Some employees may find that too many attention-grabbing notifications interrupt, rather than improve, their efficiency. 

So here are some questions worth asking about team collaboration tools and how they’re used in your organization:

·  Are the tools reliable and easy to use, for both remote and in-office employees?
·  Do employees find them too intrusive or disruptive?
·  Are there any collaboration tools that are underutilized and/or redundant?

Breaking down team silos

While silos are great for agriculture, they are not great in the workplace. A siloed team is one that is isolated, self-contained, focusing on its own goals rather than the organization’s bigger purpose.

This can mean duplicated work, delayed responses, and an overall drag on productivity. One study estimated that silos cost companies 350 hours per year on average – which is almost one day per week! In the worst case, then, silos can make the workplace feel dysfunctional, and employees may lose trust in employers that allow dysfunction to continue.

Moving forward

Establishing this kind of transparency and open communication takes time and work. However, this investment will pay off by creating a high performance workplace. Your organization’s transparency will also differentiate it from the crowd, making it easier to recruit and retain amazing talent. After all, everyone wants to live and work within a culture of trust.

At beqom we’ve developed proven tools that build trustworthy workplaces. PayAnalytics by beqom offers powerful algorithmic analysis in a user-friendly package, making it easy to visualize your pay structure, run a pay equity analysis, close any existing pay gaps and keep them closed to provide your teams with all the insights they need to effectively cultivate a culture of open communication. beqom CPM makes continuous performance management easy by integrating feedback into daily workflow.