How to Build Trust in the Workplace When Your People Work the Frontline

Ask most manufacturing or distribution CEOs why their people keep leaving and you'll hear a familiar list: the labor market, wages, the Amazon distribution center down the road, or kids these days. Tracie Sponenberg has heard every version of it, and she has a talk about it that she paraphrases as “it's not them, it's you.”

Tracie has spent roughly 25 years leading HR inside companies that make things and move things, starting her career at UPS. Today she works as an advisory and fractional chief people officer for frontline companies. On the Season 3 premiere of HR on the Frontline, “Would Your Employees Say They Trust You?,” she made the case that building trust in the workplace is the retention strategy most frontline leaders are missing, and she laid out exactly where to start.

This post pulls together her playbook, the research behind it, and seven moves you can put to work on your floor this week.

Pay matters, and Tracie is the first to say so. She also says it gets far more of the blame than it deserves.

Her explanation is simple. It's hard for someone walking out the door to say, “my manager wouldn't listen to me,” or “I constantly needed a tiny bit of flexibility, but I didn't get it,” or “I didn't feel respected.” In her words, “It's much easier to say, ‘Well, I'm getting a dollar more. I'm getting $2 more down the street.’”

The data backs her up. When McKinsey surveyed employees who had quit, the top reasons were that they didn't feel valued by their organizations (54%), didn't feel valued by their managers (52%), and didn't feel a sense of belonging at work (51%). Employers, meanwhile, tended to assume people left over compensation, work-life balance, and health (McKinsey). That gap between what leaders assume and what employees experience is where trust erodes.

Newer frontline data tells the same story from a different angle. In UKG's 2025 study of 8,200 frontline workers across 10 countries, low pay was still the top reason people would consider quitting, followed by work schedules, lack of career advancement, and lack of recognition or rewards (UKG). That's Tracie's point in one ranking: pay sets the floor, and the next three reasons are all things managers and HR can influence this quarter.

Trust shows up in the numbers that frontline leaders already track. In research published in Harvard Business Review, neuroeconomist Paul Zak found that compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report “74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, and 40% less burnout” (Harvard Business Review).

For frontline organizations the stakes are higher still. Frontline workers make up nearly 80% of the global workforce (UKG), and in UKG's 2025 frontline study, 47% said there are two separate cultures in their organization: one for frontline employees and one for everyone else (UKG). When people on the floor feel like second-class employees, trust is the first thing to go.

Tracie also points out that you can often see trust, or its absence, the moment you walk in. In a high-trust operation, people walk up and ask their line leader questions, they smile through long shifts, and they do the right things, like reporting safety issues and washing their hands on a manufacturing floor.

Tracie likes to build frameworks with and for each client, but one model she comes back to everywhere is David Horsager's 8 Pillars of Trust, from his book Trusted Leader.

Her clients often put the list on the wall. As she explained, “if you have broken trust, there's something out of alignment, and there are usually many things out of alignment.” Each of the seven moves below strengthens one or more of them.

1Get out on the floor, starting this week

When Noah asked Tracie for the one thing listeners could start today, she didn't hesitate.

She added that “there is no better use of your time, and there's no better way to build trust than to be physically there.” In her last corporate role, her first move was a listening tour and her second was working a full day in the company's central distribution center. Simply showing up earned her credibility nobody in her seat had earned before, and she still had to back it up.

She also learned that trust runs in both directions. Her former CEO liked to say he would give people all of his trust immediately, and Tracie took the first half of that to heart: “There are two sides to trust. It's giving and receiving.” The research agrees. Edelman found that when employees feel executive management doesn't trust them, only 25% trust their CEO and 43% trust their manager (Edelman).

She also shared an acquisition story that makes the point in one line. At the announcement, the acquired company's CEO told employees, “some of you know me, but many of you don't,” even though his office was across the street. The fix was unglamorous: “Spend time there. Listen to people. Do what you say you're going to do, and fix something for them that needs to be fixed.”

2Diagnose before you prescribe

Companies rarely call Tracie saying they have a trust problem. The problem shows up as high turnover, a spike in employee relations claims, or a culture that just doesn't feel right. Her rule is to always diagnose first.

You don't need a consultant to start. Tracie recommends small focus groups, pulling little groups of people together, or hosting a breakfast, and bringing in a translator if you have non-English-speaking employees. “Figure out where you're at,” she said, “and maybe it's better, maybe it's worse than you thought.”

Victoria Dew, CEO of Dew Point Communications, made the same point on an earlier episode of the show: “Listening is really critical to building trust and to maintaining trust.”

3Swap the annual survey for pulse checks and stay interviews

When Noah suggested the annual engagement survey was one useful tool among many, Tracie went further: “I'm saying you shouldn't do that.” Her reasoning is that the annual survey is backward-looking, captures a single point in time, and too often ends with no communication about results or next steps.

It's especially hard on frontline teams. As Tracie put it, “you're going to make people take a survey on a computer or on their phone that's going to take them a half hour out of their busy workday, and they don't have enough time to do it.”

In her words, “I'm a bigger fan of pulse surveys, of stay interviews, of things that keep things moving, of consistent feedback.” Stay interviews are conversations with current employees about what keeps them and what might push them out, which gives you information while you can still act on it (SHRM).

Joe Berardi, senior director of total rewards at Rexall Pharmacy Group, described how his team pairs its annual survey with regular pulse checks on big initiatives, and summed up the promise to employees this way: “We will listen. And not only will we listen, we'll act upon it.”

4Fix the system that builds your managers

Frontline managers are caught between the targets coming from the executive team and the people doing the work. Tracie is clear that when they struggle, the cause is usually upstream.

Gallup's research explains why this matters so much for trust. Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units (Gallup), yet companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time, often promoting based on success in a previous non-managerial role or tenure (Gallup).

The people in the middle are feeling it. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that manager engagement has dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, while global employee engagement fell to 20% (Gallup). When the managers who carry trust on the floor are running on empty, the system needs fixing before the people do.

Tracie's approach starts with a skills inventory: what skills you have, what you need in leadership roles, and how you'll close the gaps. When her last corporate employer had never done formal training, they built a coaching culture starting with directors and above, then rolled it down to managers and emerging leaders. Starting at the top mattered because the culture “wasn't going to take if they weren't embodying that culture.”

5Do what you say you're going to do

Of all the ways trust breaks on the frontline, broken promises may be the fastest. Tracie's example will sound familiar to anyone who has worked a floor:

Her standard is direct: “if you say you're going to do something, do it, or admit why you can't and explain how you're going to make that up or when it's going to happen.”

The same rule applies to big changes like AI. Tracie teaches AI in HR courses and warned that “people will write their own story on AI or anything else if you're not explaining what's going on.” When you don't have every answer, she argued, saying so is still an answer. That silence is costly on the frontline, where 64% of workers say they’re concerned AI might replace their job (UKG).

6Make recognition specific and tie it to impact

Recognition builds trust when it proves you actually see someone's work. Tracie's version is refreshingly practical. Go beyond a generic “thanks” and name the thing: “Thank you for getting that line fixed, or thank you for delivering that to our customer. We have 99% on-time delivery now because of you. Something that's very specific.”

That specificity pays off. Gallup found that well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to have turned over after two years, yet only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition for the work they do (Gallup).

Tracie also has a strong opinion about the most common frontline “recognition” of all.

Her advice is to keep feeding people, on pizza Fridays or just because, and to tie recognition to something more meaningful. That starts with making sure every employee understands their impact on the business, then recognizing them for it. If you're using a platform, she added, “it's got to be easy,” and the reward has to be personal, something people would actually want.

Guusto customers see what happens when frontline recognition gets this right. Andy Maus of Compass One Healthcare shared that Compass's internal analytics show “we retain 28% more of our GEM winners than non-GEM winners,” referring to recipients of its GEM recognition award.

Guusto makes it simple to recognize every employee, on the floor or in the office, with specific, timely thanks and rewards they actually want. No email address required, and every reward can be sent in minutes from a phone. Talk with a recognition expert about what would work for your frontline, with no sales pitch.

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7Audit your rewards for unintended consequences

Tracie's most surprising take in the episode was about safety awards. “I do not like safety awards,” she said, “because I think that's incentivizing people to hide injuries.” Picture a board that reads 100 workdays accident-free. As Tracie put it, “who wants to be the person to break that streak?” Everybody knows the streak is on the line, and that creates pressure not to report.

OSHA has addressed this directly. Its guidance notes that rate-based programs, which typically reward employees “at the end of an injury-free month,” are permissible only if “they are not implemented in a manner that discourages reporting,” while programs that reward reporting near misses and hazards are “always permissible” (OSHA).

Tracie would rather see companies keep a log of near misses and make sure accidents are recorded properly. Her broader point applies to every incentive you run: think about what behavior the reward actually encourages.

Rebuilding trust is harder than building it, and Tracie speaks from experience. Nineteen years ago she married a coworker who was a senior leader at the company. Neither reported to the other, but some employees assumed she couldn't be fair. She also admits she “was a really terrible manager for a long time” and had to rebuild trust with her own team.

Her path back involved acknowledging the problem, sitting with it, having a lot of uncomfortable conversations, asking for uncomfortable feedback, and consistently showing she was fair, including making sure people had somewhere else to go if they had an issue. From there, she said, it comes down to keeping the lines of communication open, being willing to admit your mistakes, being clear on the path forward, and following through.

Use these questions, drawn from Tracie's advice, to gauge where you stand before you plan your next move:

If you answered “I don't know” to more than two, your first step is Tracie’s first step: go diagnose.

HR on the Frontline podcast

Would your employees say they trust you?

Hear the full conversation. Tracie and host Noah Mithrush go deeper on the signs of a low-trust culture, why managers are set up to fail, the trust risks AI brings to the frontline, and why she tells every HR leader to read fiction.

Listen to the episode

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