Employers cut more than 150,000 jobs last month, the highest total for October in more than 20 years, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. November brought even more layoff announcements, ranging from a few hundred corporate jobs at American Airlines to more than 13,000 at Verizon.

Amid this flurry of job cuts—and the threat of more to come as artificial intelligence disrupts the white-collar workforce—we spoke with Sandra Sucher, a professor at Harvard Business School who is widely recognized for her research on trust. We asked Sucher about the impact of layoffs on organizational trust, what managers can do when they have to lay off people nonetheless, and how AI is impacting these dynamics.

Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for space and clarity:

What do we really mean when we talk about trust between employers and employees?

Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable to other people’s actions and intentions.…The thing about trust is you can’t force me to trust you. You have to behave in ways that cause me to trust you.

Usually when people evaluate whether they trust an employer, they look at things like: Are they competent? What are their motives? Where do my interests show up in the list of people whose concerns [the employer] cares about? Do you treat me and other people fairly? When you act, what’s the actual effect of that on my life?

A layoff takes away my employment. It takes away my ability to support my family. So even if everything else went really well, you still will have a hit to trust because you’ve just taken something away that’s so fundamental to what I need, and that was part of our arrangement when I came to work with you.

There’s a statement we’ve all heard, the idea that ‘AI is not going to take your job, someone who knows AI is going to.’ How does that erode trust at the same time people see job losses happening?

That statement shifts the burden from the company to the employee. Whose problem is it? [Do you] think I’m a totally self-developing individual who can anticipate the needs I have that correspond to the needs you have as a business, and then train myself?

As a corporation, you have a duty to let me know what [you want me to do] and equip me to perform that role to the standard that you’re looking for. That’s the job of the employer. The employee has to be willing to put in the time to dedicate themselves to being changed.

What does research really say about the impact large-scale layoffs have on organizational trust?

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