Employees now trust their employer more than any other institution in their lives. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, 78% of people trust their employer, ahead of business in general (64%) and government (53%). That figure looks like good news for leadership teams. It is also a warning.
When trust is concentrated so heavily in one relationship, the cost of losing it rises sharply. A missed announcement, a mistranslated policy update, or a leadership message that lands differently in Singapore than it does in São Paulo can do more damage than a single bad quarter. Trust has become the asset enterprises spend down or build up with every piece of communication they send, and for organisations operating across languages and time zones, that spending happens constantly.
This is what makes trust the new currency in enterprise communications. It is earned in small, repeated transactions, and it is far easier to lose than to rebuild.
The same Edelman research points to a harder problem underneath the headline number. Seventy percent of people say they are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who differs from them in values, background, culture, or approach to social issues. Forty-two percent would rather switch departments than report to a manager whose values differ from their own.
For a domestic business, that insularity is a culture challenge. For a multinational one, it is structural. Global organisations are, by definition, built from people who differ in background, language and cultural reference points. If a meaningful share of employees start from a position of hesitancy toward difference, trust cannot be assumed. It has to be actively constructed, and communication is the primary tool for constructing it.
Edelman also found that 75% of respondents believe CEOs are obligated to help bridge these divides, yet only 44% think their CEO actually does it well. That gap between expectation and delivery is where trust erodes fastest, and it tends to be widest in organisations where leadership messaging does not reliably reach everyone in a form they can fully understand.
It is tempting to treat translation and interpretation as a back-office logistics issue: get the words into the right language and move on. The evidence suggests employees experience it very differently.
Onboarding is already a fragile trust-building moment before language even enters the equation. Gallup finds that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job onboarding new hires, at precisely the stage when a new employee is deciding how much confidence to place in their employer. For multilingual staff, that fragile moment carries an added layer of risk. Separate workplace research from Babbel for Business found that one in five workers feel judged for their accent, with anxiety about how they speak costing top earners as much as 25,000 dollars a year in lost productivity. Among employees earning over 100,000 dollars, nearly a quarter report spending more than two hours a day worrying about how they communicate rather than what they communicate.
None of that is a translation quality issue in the narrow sense. It is a trust issue. When employees have to work harder than their colleagues to understand a policy, follow a town hall, or participate in a discussion, they receive a clear signal about how much the organisation has invested in including them. Language access, in other words, is one of the clearest and most measurable ways an enterprise demonstrates whether inclusion is a stated value or a practised one.
Enterprises that treat trust as deliberately as they treat revenue tend to share a few habits.
Town halls, restructuring announcements, safety briefings and compliance updates are the moments employees remember. A message that is broadly translated but imprecisely delivered in these settings does more harm than a delayed one, because it teaches employees that nuance is optional when it comes to them.
Given the 31-point gap between employees who expect their CEO to bridge divides and those who feel that expectation is met, leaders should treat multilingual, real-time access to their own voice, not a summarised or delayed version of it, as part of the job. Employees notice when leadership communication is filtered through delay or translation lag before it reaches them.
Trust compounds when employees in every market receive communications with the same speed, tone and accuracy as employees at headquarters. Inconsistency, even unintentional, reads as a hierarchy of importance among regions.
Track who attends live sessions, who relies on delayed translations, and who disengages from communications they cannot fully follow. These are leading indicators of a trust problem long before they show up in engagement survey scores.
The most common mistake is treating trust building as a messaging exercise rather than an infrastructure one. Better wording will not close a 31-point credibility gap if a fifth of the workforce cannot access the message in a form they trust. The organisations closing that gap are the ones auditing where communication breaks down between headquarters and the rest of the business, then investing in the interpretation, translation and captioning infrastructure that removes the breakdown rather than working around it.
Trust is not built in a single announcement. It accumulates, or erodes, across every interaction an organisation has with its people, and language is one of the clearest signals employees use to judge which direction it is moving. For enterprises operating across borders, closing the gap between what leaders intend to communicate and what employees actually receive is the foundation the rest of the trust equation sits on.
To see how real-time interpretation and captioning can close that gap for your organisation, explore the Interprefy platform.