Trust in U.S. institutions has never been lower, according to a recent Gallup poll. But even as institutional trust is on decline, organizations must persist in trying to build it within their workforce and with their customers.

Dr. Peter H. Kim, PhD, professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California, and author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired has found this dilemma so important that he’s made it the focus of his academic study as a social scientist.

“[As a child], I had not lived in one place for more than four years at a time,” Kim said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s LA conference. His family bounced around from Korea to Japan to South America to New York to Chicago. “We just kept moving and moving as my parents tried to build a better life for us. As we entered and exited new communities, I became quite aware of how easily we can inform impressions of one another, and how they can make a marked difference in how we relate to one another.” These impressions, whether at work or at home, can be based on all sorts of things and not necessarily reflect how truly trustworthy we are.

As much as companies rely on written rules and official communications, to run well they depend on trust among colleagues. When our trust is broken, or our own trustworthiness is doubted, many of us are left wondering what to do. Dr. Kim, a leading expert in the field of trust repair, reveals the surprising truths about how relationships are built, broken, and restored.

Trust Within the Hiring Process

“Trust is a psychological state,” said moderator Alison Brower, contributing editor at The Ankler. And it comes down, Kim says, to a willingness to make yourself vulnerable instead of just mitigating risk. “That willingness has to be based on positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another. And so this takes you away from the idea that you might cooperate for reasons due to incentives. This is based on the belief that the other person should be trusted—[that] they are worthy of your trust.”

A lot of Kim’s early studies focused on the hiring process, which requires a balance of trust, transparency, and healthy skepticism as we interact with people we’ve just met. While trust is usually associated with one’s significant other or family, based on years of extended knowledge, “it turns out that most of our interactions are with people we don’t know very well. They’re based on loose ties, loose connections, rather than strong, tight relationships,” Kim said. “And so that’s how we make decisions to trust on a more frequent basis. It’s also how we can gain insight into how trust operates.” Studying looser ties shows just how those gut decisions happen quickly, rather than taking years of relationship history into consideration.

“People have much less trust in our institutions now,” Brower said, and that includes workers who are skeptical not only of their employers but of HR professionals. Talent professionals can take steps to engender that trust in themselves and in the company they represent, even during this time of insecurity in the workforce. “One of the most customary approaches to dealing with trust issues is to create systems that ensure compliance,” Kim said. And while those rules may make sense for more “mission critical” aspects of an organization, if overdone they can impede innovation and success. “As organizations grow, they [can] become so bureaucratic that they are not able to get things done.”

Kim cites Netflix as an example of an organization that “starts from a position of trust,” eschewing traditional infrastructures such as vacation policies or gift policies. “They have a five-word policy that simply says, ‘Act in Netflix’s best interests.’” And while the company is not, he said, “an idealistic Ivory tower” and doesn’t shy away from firing workers, it does maximize accountability and has certainly seen exponential growth.

Beware the Hive Mind

Workplaces are essentially one large group, made up of smaller collectives such as departments or teams. Kim cautions workers to “beware the hive mind,” noting that intergroup bias means “we tend to favor our own group, and we are less kind and respectful to members of out-groups. It allows us to nurture and maintain trust very effectively in our group, but that comes at a clear cost: those who are not in our group, we will treat with suspicion.” We are quicker to judge or to attribute blame to those outside the group. “[And] we are more likely to come up with simplistic rationales that will enable us to denigrate everyone in that whole category, whereas in your group, you might see every person as an individual, and deal with them in a much more nuanced way,” Kim said.

Group dynamics can exacerbate problems that already exist at an individual level. Leaders can help mitigate this, Kim says, by breaking down group boundaries through multiple group memberships. “So, you're not only part of your own division, but you're also part of another part of the organization, so that you don't have this simple identity that can delineate your own group from others so cleanly,” he said. The more permeable the group connections, the easier it will be for employees to see members of other groups as humans rather than “caricatures.”

When it comes to DEI efforts, Kim lauds any attempt at “fairness” but also cautions that fairness can mean different things to different people, in different situations. “How you achieve something is as important as what you try to achieve, and if you don’t pursue that in a nuanced way and get buy-in from all the people who are affected by these decisions, then you’re going to get resistance, and that’s what I see a lot in organizations,” Kim said. “When you believe that you are standing on principle, you become less willing to engage in the dialogue to figure out how to achieve that principle in the face of other principles that other people might also value. It becomes a matter of domination rather than dialogue.”

Ultimately, choosing empathy and trust over blame and suspicion will help us strengthen our connections and move our organizations forward. “The story you tell about why things happened is as important as whether that thing happened or not,” Kim said. “It’s made me much more deliberate about the attributions I make, to move beyond the snap judgment, and to be much more careful about how I view the world and other people.”

Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.