When Employees Trust a Chatbot More Than HR

Workplace well-being, trust, and implications for population mental health

Posted May 29, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

In clinical practice, trust is not a soft concept. It is the mechanism through which people meaningfully engage in care. Employers aren’t clinicians, but work is a key component of well-being , and there is an increasing expectation for HR to serve as an entry point to accessing mental healthcare. When trust breaks down between an employee and their organization, the consequences are not abstract. They are measurable, and they compound over time.

The data from Modern Health’s latest workforce survey is attention -grabbing. The findings weren’t entirely surprising, but what was most striking was the speed and scale at which workplace trust is eroding. Just 33 percent of employees strongly agree that their employer values their mental health—down from 41 percent in 2025. That is an 8-percentage-point drop in a single year. That is a worrying signal.

What concerns me most is what this lack of trust may be driving behaviorally when it comes to engaging in mental healthcare. Fifty percent of employees are not using employer-provided mental health days because they are afraid of being judged for using them. Sixty-five percent have actively hidden mental health struggles at work to avoid appearing weak, up 9 points from last year.

This avoidance, driven by a lack of trust, suggests that stigma still plays a role in barriers to care. When people cannot, or will not, access support, symptoms may not resolve, and they can worsen, leading to poorer long-term mental and physical health outcomes.

Another striking finding in these data is that 58 percent of employees say they feel safer discussing their mental health with a chatbot than with their workplace HR department. This has increased from 50 percent in 2025. I want to be careful not to dismiss the role technology can play in lowering barriers to support: there is genuine value in accessible, low-stigma tools, and recent research suggests that purpose-built (i.e., mental health-focused) products may be effective. But when more than half of a workforce doesn’t feel safe disclosing psychological distress to a human within their organization, it tells us something important about the relational environment those people are operating in. In many workplaces, trust has effectively broken down.

The literature is clear on this: social support and connectedness are robust protective factors against the development and progression of mental health conditions. A workforce that cannot trust human support from its employer has lost access to one of its primary buffers against stress . This matters enormously given the volume of stressors currently converging: AI-related job anxiety , political uncertainty, financial pressure, and rising performance expectations are all showing up in our data at the same time.

We are also seeing the physical manifestations of this stress accumulating. In the past 30 days alone, 51 percent of employees report having cried due to work stress, and 52 percent have experienced anxiety or panic-like symptoms at work. Sustained anxiety, over time, can contribute to physical health concerns like cardiovascular disease and worsened mental health outcomes. The workplace mental health crisis is a costly public health concern.

What would I want employers to understand from a clinical perspective? Structural access to resources is necessary but not sufficient. You can offer the most comprehensive benefits package available and still have a workforce that will not use it if the culture signals against seeking help.

Rebuilding trust requires behavioral change at every level of the organization in ways that are highly visible, consistent, and repeated. Leaders need to model healthy behaviors and normalize seeking support. Managers need to be trained to spot early signs of distress and direct employees to the right resources without taking on the role of therapist. And organizations need to examine honestly whether the conditions they are creating are ones in which human beings can perform sustainably.

The impact of social determinants of health is well-documented. The trajectory of this data indicates a distress signal across the workforce. People are feeling distressed, and one of the potential access points to managing that distress doesn’t feel trustworthy, preventing them from addressing the concerns they’re experiencing. The good news is that trust is something organizations can actively work to rebuild. However, as with most interventions, it’s far better to intervene before a crisis than after.

Modern Health. (2026). Workforce mental health report (April 2026). https://explore.modernhealth.com/modern-health-mental-health-insights-u…

Rollwage, M., McFadyen, J., Juchems, K., et al. (2026). A cognitive layer architecture to support large-language model performance in psychotherapy interactions. Nature Medicine, 32 , 1717–1725. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04278-w

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Jessica Watrous, Ph.D. , affiliated with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, is also Director of Clinical and Scientific Affairs at Modern Health.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.