TLDR
Building trust in the workplace is usually treated as a leadership problem, and most of the published research treats it that way too. But when employees ask a coach for help with a specific colleague, 27 percent of the time they are asking one thing: how does this person actually work? Just how they work, usually before anything has even gone wrong (Cloverleaf, Relational Work Index).
About the research. The Relational Work Index is built on a four month study of 29,374 coaching conversations on the Cloverleaf platform (January to April 2026), sorted by topic and by the role of the person asking. A separate analysis provides the supporting detail on what people ask about a named colleague. Almost half of all coaching questions name a specific colleague.
Key takeaways
People are already trying to build trust. However, they often lack necessary information about each other to do so. When employees ask for help with a specific colleague, 27% of the time the question is about how a specific teammate works.
Employees ask for is practical trust-building advice. The top two requests are how a colleague works (27%) and how to get aligned with them on priorities (18%). Help building the relationship itself is 9%. They want to understand how that person makes decisions and their preferences when it comes to teamwork.
Employees proactively seek coaching to help build trust. They want to understand a colleague while the two of them are working together, before any misunderstanding or conflict. Questions about difficult conversations (6%) and giving feedback (4%) barely register by comparison.
Trust is built between two specific people, which is why team-wide training can miss the mark. About half of all coaching questions name a colleague rather than a skill. Because people are different, what each person needs to communicate and how they communicate it will depend on who they want to build trust with.
See where difficult conversations breakdown
Why do teams with good managers still have trust problems?
Trust with a manager and trust between two coworkers are different relationships, and almost everything organizations measure and train targets the first one.
That first relationship matters. Gallup finds that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. The quality of that relationship can drastically impact business outcomes.
Now count the pairs on a team of eight. There are seven manager relationships. There are twenty-one relationships between coworkers.
Most of the working day happens inside the twenty-one relationships amongst the team. In a survey of 1,100 full-time U.S. employees, 71% reported collaborating during at least 41% of their working time, roughly 3.2 hours of an eight-hour day. In the same survey, 31% said they had received no professional development at all on building those working relationships.
Many engagement surveys and leadership development efforts primarily target the relationships between a manager and their direct report. But few organizations have any insight or resources to help the other twenty-one co-worker relationships understand each other and build trust.
There is a reason for that gap. Almost every widely cited study of workplace trust measures a relationship that runs up or down the org chart, not across it.
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Source
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What it found
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Who trusts whom
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Which direction it measures
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21% strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership
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Do employees trust their leaders?
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Up the org chart
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19% of associates trust their CEO to tell the truth; 52% of executives do
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Do employees trust the CEO?
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Up the org chart
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86% of executives say they highly trust employees; 60% of employees feel trusted
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Do executives trust their employees?
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Down the org chart
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74% less stress, 50% higher productivity
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Do employees trust the organization?
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Up the org chart
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27% of colleague-specific coaching questions are "how does this person work"
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Do coworker and peers trust each other?
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Horizontally across the team
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What do employees most want to know about building trust with a coworker?
Employees want to know how a specific colleague makes decisions, what they prioritize, and how they prefer to be communicated with. It is the most common thing they ask about a named colleague, nearly three times as often as difficult conversations and giving feedback combined.
These are the questions employees bring about a specific colleague, ranked by how often each one comes up.
Both of the top two requests are asking for the same underlying thing: the ability to recognize and honor how different coworkers operate. That same desire from coworkers holds up even where a dispute is already underway. In the conflict data, employees ask how to understand a colleague 2.5 times as often as they ask how to resolve a dispute with them.
Now compare that with what people are actually trained on. In MIT Sloan Management Review’s workplace collaboration survey, 31% of employees said they had received no professional development at all on building collaborative working relationships, and only 26% had received more than a couple of hours. The thing employees ask about most often is the thing they are least likely to have been taught.
What do coworkers actually ask when they want to build trust with each other?
Across 25,155 coaching questions employees wrote themselves, 782 are explicitly about building trust. Sixty percent of them name a particular colleague. Below is a sampling of the questions employees ask to build trust with their coworkers.
Nearly 4 to 1
Questions about working with a specific named colleague are the largest theme in this data, at 3,005. Questions that explicitly name trust as the problem number 782. People reach for help with a particular working relationship far more often than they reach for help with trust as a subject.
Less than 1 in 20
Of the 782 trust questions, fewer than one in twenty are about rebuilding trust after it broke. The rest are people trying to establish it, often with a new manager, a teammate they are about to depend on, or a colleague during a change already underway.
TAKEAWAY
What actually builds trust in the workplace?
Give people a way to understand how their colleagues actually work. That means everyone on the team knowing a few concrete things about each other: how each person prefers to receive information, how they typically make decisions, what they tend to protect when everything becomes urgent, and how they might behave under pressure.
People who have to work together need insightful information that keeps them from misreading each other, even when the team changes.
This the most common thing employees are already asking for, at every level.
Does what people need to build trust change as they move up?
Barely. Working with a specific named colleague is the first or second most common coaching request at every role level measured, inside a band of about three percentage points.
Every one of the 29,374 coaching conversations was tagged with the role of the person who asked it. The questions inside each role were then grouped by topic and ranked. The table below shows where one topic, working with a specific named colleague, landed in each role’s ranking, and what share of that role’s total questions it accounted for.
What should coworkers actually know about each other?
Eight topics came up most often when employees asked for help with a specific colleague, roughly in order of how often they appeared. Each one is something a person wanted to know before working with someone else.
01
How to communicate with them, and what wording lands
02
How they prefer to build a working relationship
03
Their work style, pace and level of detail
04
Their priorities, and what they will protect when deadlines collide
05
What motivates them
06
How they make decisions and give buy-in
07
How they respond under pressure
08
How they prefer to receive feedback
A team whose members can answer those eight questions about each other has removed most of what people otherwise have to guess at.
Most people learn them slowly, through months of trial and error, and often after a misunderstanding has already happened. Assessments can speed it up, but a team that has separately taken DISC, 16 Types and CliftonStrengths® ends up with three vocabularies and no single picture of anyone.
Cloverleaf synthesizes 13+ market leading behavioral assessments into one read of how each person works, so the answers to those eight questions sit in one place that everyone on the team can see.
How Cloverleaf helps teams build trust
Trust that depends on personal chemistry does not scale. It works until the team changes, someone new joins, or two people who have never worked together are put on the same project.
FAQ: building your own AI coach
What do employees most want to understand about a colleague?
In Cloverleaf coaching data, 27% of questions about a named colleague are about understanding how they operate. Aligning on priorities is second at 18%. Difficult conversations and feedback together account for 10%.
How do you build trust with a team you just inherited?
Get a shared read of how each person works rather than learning it over months by trial and error. Ask each person to name one way they are wired and one thing they need support with. For a fuller approach, see building trust as a new manager.
4 Ways To Make Coworker Trust a Development Priority
Knowing that trust gets built between two specific people doesn’t tell you what to change on Monday. Four moves, each small enough to start this quarter:
1. Focus on trust across the team, not just up the org chart. Five of the six most-cited workplace trust sources measure a relationship that runs up or down the hierarchy. If nothing in your engagement survey asks about the twenty-one coworker relationships on a team of eight, nothing gets built there either.
2. Democratize relational development beyond direct reports. Working with a specific colleague is the first or second most common coaching request at every role level, from individual contributor (12.1%) to senior leader (12.8%). Most organizations put that help inside manager training, which means an individual contributor waits for a promotion to get it. Put it in front of both.
3. Proactive provide people the insight they need about each other. Fewer than one in twenty trust questions are about repair. The rest come from people starting a new working relationship, meeting a new manager, or working through a change already underway. Front-load it: the new hire’s first week, the team that just formed, the day the reorg lands.
4. Consolidate a synthesized shared language for your team. A team that has separately taken DISC, 16 Types and CliftonStrengths® ends up with three languages and no single picture of anyone. Pick one place where everyone can see how each teammate prefers to receive information, how they make decisions, what they protect when deadlines collide, and how they respond under pressure.
None of these require a new program or a bigger budget. They require a different unit of measurement: not what one person is learning, but what two people who have to work together already know about each other before they start.
See where employees most want help concerning conflict
The Relational Work Index reveals where to aim development next, drawn from nearly 30,000 real coaching conversations.
SOURCES
Cloverleaf, Relational Work Index (29,374 coaching conversations, January to April 2026, plus a separate one month analysis); Cloverleaf, Thrive: A Collaboration Manifesto; Gallup, Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement; Gallup, Why Trust in Leaders Is Faltering (McLain and Pendell, April 2023); Crasta and Mashek, Workplace Collaboration Survey, MIT Sloan Management Review (1,100 US full-time employees, Spring 2022); Edelman Trust Barometer, Trust at Work 2024; PwC Trust in Business Survey 2024; Great Place To Work; Paul Zak, The Neuroscience of Trust, Harvard Business Review, 2017.