Trust takes time to build. It can disappear remarkably quickly.
For Dev Jha, CHRO, India Glycols, that makes trust one of the more important dimensions of organisational culture, particularly as AI begins to reshape the relationship between people, managers and work itself.
Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Jha pointed to what he sees as a worrying shift in the workplace: trust between employees and managers, and between employees and management, appears to be diminishing.
The arrival of AI makes that relationship more complicated.
As humans and AI increasingly work alongside one another, organisations will have to confront a new set of questions around trust. How comfortable will employees be relying on AI? How will managers make decisions when human judgement and machine-generated insight intersect? And what happens to existing relationships inside organisations as more work is shared between people and technology?
For Jha, these questions ultimately lead back to culture.
“All of us agreed that it takes a generation to build the culture,” he said. Yet what takes years to create can be damaged “in a day or an hour”.
That asymmetry matters. Culture accumulates gradually through repeated experiences, relationships and behaviour. Trust works in much the same way. But a single decision or action can challenge assumptions that may have taken years to establish.
AI therefore adds another layer to an already difficult cultural equation. Technology may change how work gets done, but organisations will still have to understand whether employees trust their managers, their leadership and, increasingly, the systems with which they are expected to work.
At the HRKatha Inner Circle on the Culture–Performance Equation, Jha’s observation raised a larger question: if trust is fundamental to culture but can deteriorate so quickly, can organisations identify the warning signs before the damage becomes visible?
Watch Dev Jha explain why trust could become even more critical as humans and AI learn to work together.
