SEATTLE, Wash., April 29, 2026 – SparkEffect President and CEO Kim Bohr joined host Brent Skinner on HR.com’s Future of Payroll and Workforce Management podcast. Her case: trust isn’t a soft ideal. It’s a measurable business input, and the workforce decisions organizations make every day are quietly building it or breaking it.
Kim walked through SparkEffect’s Trust in Turbulence research and the Trust Performance Index behind it. The index measures trust across five domains: strategic clarity, psychological safety, relational continuity, technology and systems trust, and fairness and change impact perception. Her core argument was that trust belongs on the executive dashboard with every other KPI. Engagement surveys and NPS scores show where trust stands, she said, but “it’s not telling you what the inputs are that are really breaking, and where the disconnect is.”
The research found three consistent weak spots across organizations: strategic clarity, technology and systems trust, and fairness and change impact perception. Those are the areas that matter most during disruption. Technology and systems trust scored lowest of all. Employees trust a system until it rolls out poorly, Kim explained, and mishandled operational decisions showed a 28% deficit in trust. Her advice for anyone choosing a vendor or planning a major systems change was to weigh the people side of the change, not just the systems side.
That damage lands hardest on frontline and middle managers. They absorb the fallout from policy changes, scheduling decisions, and payroll issues they often didn’t control. Kim shared practical ways to support them: translate the big picture into what it means for each team, explain why changes are happening, and run regular team-level trust check-ins.
The most encouraging finding was that disruption doesn’t have to cost trust. Organizations that handled disruption exceptionally well saw trust scores 12% above baseline, higher than organizations that had no disruption at all. “A really well handled implementation actually can gain us bigger trust inside our organization,” Kim said.
Listen to the full episode on HR.com or watch it on YouTube. To explore the research behind the conversation, visit sparkeffect.com.
