At Amazon and Alaska Airlines, employee trust starts with the follow-up

Each day, Amazon employees answer a short question that gauges their engagement and satisfaction on the job. When an Amazon comms team took a closer look at those responses recently, it revealed an unexpected issue.

“What we found when we were digging into the data is that we’d lost trust in the system itself,” said Hilary Sparrow, head of engagement and communications at Amazon, during Ragan’s 2026 Internal Communications Conference. “Employees didn’t even trust the measurement tool. As we looked at the anecdotes and did listening sessions, we realized we had a real challenge sharing the data back out and communicating what we were doing in response.”

That discovery moved Sparrow’s team’s work from collecting feedback to proving it mattered to leadership. They then built a campaign around showing employees what leaders heard and did about it.

“We’re talking about it at all-team meetings and bringing it into our regular newsletter,” she said. “We’re also drilling down to the team level, giving managers the tools and resources to have ongoing conversations. When employees are giving feedback into a void, that is a huge trust buster.”

Give employees a reason to keep sharing their perspectives

Alexa Rudin, vice president of communications at Alaska Airlines, joined Sparrow on stage for the closing fireside chat. After Alaska acquired Hawaiian Airlines, Rudin’s team launched a shared values campaign with employees from both airlines. Safety was a key item — but the team took an unusual tactic when it came to sharing success.

“You think about a construction site where it’s ‘zero days since last incident,’” Rudin said. “For Alaska, we have a totally opposite mindset in terms of reporting. The more reports, the smarter we are about our operation and safety, so we celebrate it. On our intranet, we have a ticker that tracks the number of reports coming in, and the higher the ticker is, the happier we are.”

Rudin noted that at any airline, safety should be the top value, and Alaska gives employees a financial stake because reporting counts toward the year-end metrics behind bonuses. But she also said that incentivization alone won’t sustain that habit.

“We started a campaign called ‘You Report, We Respond’ to encourage employees to do the reporting and also feel good about it, that it’s going somewhere,” she said. “There might be a report where there’s no there there, so we actually follow up and say, ‘We looked into it, but there’s nothing,’ so it doesn’t perpetuate into something bigger.”

Humanity is the keystone of effective internal comms

Rudin told the audience that at Alaska, the leaders who employees trust the most are the ones who communicate consistently. That’s true whether or not they have news to share, as simple visibility makes a huge difference in shoring up trust.

“A lot of leaders want to show up in this perfect way,” she said. “They think to be perfect, they have to have a whole story and be able to answer all the questions. That’s not true at all. It’s just as effective to say, ‘Here’s what I don’t have yet.’”

Sparrow echoed Rudin’s sentiment and said that sharing the results of that question is only one part of her team’s job. The team also ties its messaging back to the company’s leadership principles and strategy, so employees share a common set of values.

“Part of what happens when busy teams are moving so fast and executing so quickly is that we forget to anchor back,” she said. “One of the important roles my team plays is reminding people over and over again of our key messages. That repetition across events, newsletters and other communications tools has been really critical for us. I think consistency really is trust.”

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Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan. You can follow him on LinkedIn here.