The breakdown of trust is when supervisors, managers, directors, department heads fail to engage in dialogue early on. By the time HR hears about it, we need to sit both parties down and have the difficult conversation that somebody refused to have.
The breakdown of trust is when supervisors, managers, directors, department heads fail to engage in dialogue early on. By the time HR hears about it, we need to sit both parties down and have the difficult conversation that somebody refused to have.
A supervisor usually becomes aware of a workplace dispute well before HR does. Addressing it early is a supervisory responsibility, but deferral is common, and those deferred disputes may reach HR as a formal complaint or a threat of litigation. Cases that arrive in that form typically require outside counsel, at rates an HR budget absorbs after the fact. The supervisor's initial response (or lack thereof) tends to determine the cost of the whole sequence.
Amir Rezaeian is a Senior Human Resources Business Partner at Mission Edge, where he leads organizational design, leadership development, and talent architecture for multi-state, mission-driven organizations. There, Rezaeian built employee relations frameworks covering intake, investigation standards, documentation, and risk. He was previously the sole HR manager and de facto compliance officer at a high-volume pediatric clinic, directing staff transitions through a merger. Over the past year, he's been building AI-powered workforce intelligence tools with his team which flag where tension is forming before it turns into a case.
"The breakdown of trust is when supervisors, managers, directors, department heads fail to engage in dialogue early on. By the time HR hears about it, we need to sit both parties down and have the difficult conversation that somebody refused to have," says Rezaeian. His claim is that cases arriving at HR late were reachable earlier, by whichever supervisor saw the friction first. Reaching them takes training for managers and a funding case for leadership.
Trust breaks at the handoff
Rezaeian draws the example of a complaint moving from supervisor to manager to department head, with each of them able to address it and pass it on. He says the same conversation gets harder at each stop. The opening often belongs to a frontline manager, who hears the complaint ahead of everyone above. "It's mostly the confidence building and capability building of managers that we see as a major gap in the trust building," says Rezaeian.
Fear of a lawsuit accounts for part of the reluctance, and Rezaeian describes a manager worrying that something shared in a performance review could become evidence later. Rezaeian describes the rest of it as habit, having seen organizations rely on their lawyers so consistently that managers had little reason to build the skill. "The counsel has historically bailed them out enough times, so they just learned this helplessness," he explains.
Rezaeian's own approach is to name what the employee has avoided saying. He brings the person into his office for a candid conversation and notes the complaint stops there in most cases. "You offer them some support and hear them out," he says. "They often tell you that's all they wanted and that they just needed to vent a bit."
Translating what the tools report
In BambooHR's Redesigning Work: AI's Performance Review report, 76% of HR professionals call themselves confident, everyday AI users, and 50% of employees say the same. Survey data also shows 67% of HR leaders would trust AI to interview a candidate, with 34% of workers agreeing. Separately, 39% of staff now ask AI for help with issues they once took to HR or operations, and 27% say they will ask AI before admitting they need help.
Today's pulse survey tools can send employees a few questions a day or a week, and Rezaeian runs his own. He credits AI with compiling the answers into a summary a supervisor can read in a minute. The result scores the team's mood, moving from green toward yellow as the answers turn negative. "AI did the data collection for you and data analysis, but you're responsible for looking at the data and translating it," notes Rezaeian.
Rezaeian’s team took the resulting pulse data to an AI tool, asked how to handle it, and the answers it offered stopped short of the judgment a manager brings to a team. He treats that step as the human part of the work, and looks to senior leadership to build the capability through training.
Showing prevention in dollars
Rezaeian made a case for expanding the people and culture team and needed supporting data before the board would commit. He built an ROI dashboard, using AI to pull three years of records from calendar invites to email exchanges. It found six to 10 investigations that stopped short of a lawyer, and 20 more complaints resolved before an investigation opened. One of those involved a senior employee and a claim that could have reached court. "This is how much we saved by just transitioning that person out with an internal review and a severance agreement signed," recalls Rezaeian. "You just paid somebody $25,000 versus $1.5 million in litigation."
Another number on the dashboard came from what outside investigators charge in his local metro area, and Rezaeian set that beside what his own team could absorb. The board approved the expansion once both numbers were in front of it. He credits the savings to protocols the team had built in advance. "If you want to bring an external investigator to do an investigation, they charge 700 dollars an hour," notes Rezaeian. "If we have in house capability and capacity, like HRBPs who can do investigation, that's far less."
For Rezaeian, early intervention is a retention tool. Whoever owns the people function has to hold that view first, including a CFO covering it part-time. Rezaeian takes it from there to department heads and team leaders, who need the authority to settle disputes on their own teams. "Our job is not to terminate people. Our job is to focus on the team output and the product that we're putting out there," Rezaeian concludes. "It should come in the form of empathy, but at the same time, very firm accountability from the top."
